by Terry Shames
“Smells good in here,” I say.
“It’s not much,” Glo says, with a mischievous grin. “Turkey hash.”
“Sounds fine.” I try to muster some enthusiasm. Glo pushes us out of the kitchen so she can finish cooking. It’s chilly outside, but Frank and I decide to take a walk along the shoreline.
“Now don’t you disappear on me,” Glo says. “It’s just like men to wander off when the meal is almost ready.”
I grin, remembering that Jeanne frequently complained about the same thing. While we stroll, Frank asks how the investigation is going on Lewis Wilkins’s death. “I don’t mind telling you, seeing him all torn up like that was like a nightmare.”
“I’ve got a few leads, but nothing substantial. It was good of you and your wife to invite his family for Thanksgiving.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know that we helped. Our grandkids are a handful, and Margaret and her kids didn’t come out of their shell much.” He shakes his head. “A terrible thing for the family, and I get the feeling they aren’t happy with each other. Especially the daughter, Emily.”
“No, they aren’t happy with each other, but I do know they were glad to spend time at your place. It helped them get their mind off things.”
Glo sticks her head out the door and calls us in. “Come on in the kitchen and fill your bowls,” she says.
I get near the stove and see what looks like a big pot of chili. “This doesn’t look like any leftover turkey to me,” I say.
She laughs. “I was teasing. Even if I liked turkey hash, which I don’t, I couldn’t have made it because the turkey was picked clean at Thanksgiving dinner. When my grandkids get to be teenagers I’m going to have to get a fifty-pound bird.”
We enjoy a good meal, and afterward sit drinking coffee and eating leftover pie.
“I must admit our reasons for having you over weren’t entirely selfless,” Glo says.
“Oh?”
“Frank and I have been talking, and the more we thought about it, the more we wondered if Lewis was into something . . .”
“Something dodgy,” Frank finishes her sentence.
“Anything in particular make you ask?”
“It’s Margaret. She seemed . . .” Glo looks at her husband to fill in the blanks again.
“Like a whipped dog. We never saw any evidence that he hit her or anything, but once or twice we heard him yelling at her. And a few times we heard him leave in the evening long after you’d think they should have settled down.”
“Not that it’s our business,” Glo says. “I don’t like being the nosy neighbor. On the other hand, I couldn’t help thinking it was odd for him to leave her alone in the evening like that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
They look at each other. “We didn’t think of it, had both forgotten. We were busy with the family, and then it was Thanksgiving and we didn’t have a chance to talk to each other. Then Glo reminded me.”
“How often did he go out?”
“Only a few times. Although it might have been more often and we didn’t see him.”
It’s not new information, but it adds fuel to my suspicion that Lewis Wilkins was up to no good.
I had hoped that Margaret or Daniel would be back by now, but no one answers the door, so I head back to the station. I’m restless. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, even investigating crimes slows to a crawl as everybody takes a deep breath before the holidays start in earnest. Action will pick back up tomorrow, but the lull gives me time to think. On a whim I drive to the park along the lake. Although it’s chilly, there’s no wind and in midafternoon there’s a weak sun. I sit on a picnic table and stare out at the bleak-looking lake. Clouds periodically cover the sun, giving the landscape a bare and gloomy look.
Dusty is delighted by the chance to waddle around in the wide-open spaces. Oblivious to the cold, he sniffs every possible blade of grass and clump of dirt and stops a few times to lend his scent to that of other animals.
While I watch him, I mull over my two challenges—the two women in my life and the murder—not necessarily in that order.
Lewis Wilkins could have been killed because of the damage he did to a patient. But the patient’s family was receiving a lot of money, and the only reason to think someone would murder him was pure revenge. Still, I should follow up with the family to find out what kind of people they are and whether one of them was holding a grudge left unsatisfied by the monetary award.
He could have gotten himself into a gambling bind. But why would someone kill him if he owed them money? He couldn’t pay them back if he was dead. Maybe his death would be a warning to someone else. Or, if he was gambling on dogfights, is there something I don’t know about dogfighting that means he was more likely to get himself killed if he owed money? And if he owed money, surely it wasn’t more than the two hundred thousand I found in his SUV.
I hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that a member of his family killed him. After all, how would they orchestrate such a horrible death? It doesn’t add up. Margaret might have been fed up. She seemed shocked by his death, but she wouldn’t be the first widow to make more of a husband’s death than she actually felt. As for his son, Daniel, he strikes me as an easy-going young man, considerate of his mother and angry at his sister for her lousy attitude. Emily is a different matter. She’s obviously got issues with her parents. But there are a lot of ways to kill somebody—even if you hire someone else to do it. Why would she go to the trouble of finding someone to kill him with vicious dogs?
I even consider Dooley Phillips. I have a feeling Dooley is covering up something. The way he tried to misdirect me with the boat still seems odd. If there’s a reason why he arranged for Wilkins’s murder, though, it escapes me.
And of course there is always the possibility that Wilkins was into something I haven’t uncovered yet.
I’m starting to get cold when Dusty wanders in my direction and plops down with a sigh. I scoop him up and head for the truck. He flops down in the box and is sound asleep by the time the tires hit the pavement.
I was hoping there would be a message from Maria telling me what she learned on the errand I sent her on, but it’s still a little early.
I go home to wait for Maria’s call. Dusty is tired out from his activities and as soon as I feed him, he’s out. I didn’t know puppies slept so much. I stow his box in the bedroom so if I’m doing things in the front of the house I won’t wake him up.
I haven’t been in the house five minutes when someone raps on the door. It’s Loretta and she has a package in her hands. I’m happy to see her back.
She plops the bag down on the kitchen table. “I brought something for you from my sister-in-law.” She pulls out a cloth-wrapped bundle and unwraps it. It’s a dark, heavy fruitcake full of nuts, the only kind worth eating, as far as I’m concerned. “Isn’t that a beauty? She makes a good fruitcake. Better than any I ever tried to make.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
She snorts. “It is. And she won’t tell me the secret ingredient.”
I reach out to pinch off a piece and she slaps my hand away. “It will be ready to eat by Christmas. You’re supposed to pour brandy over it once a week until then.”
“How much brandy?”
She cocks her head at me, measuring me. “What do you mean ‘how much’? Until it doesn’t absorb anymore.” At the look on my face she says, “Never mind, I’ll keep it at my house and do it myself, and then I’ll bring it to you. But you have to pay for the brandy.”
“I’ll pay enough for my cake and yours, too.”
I make us a cup of coffee, glad to have her chattering in the background.
“I’m so glad to be home. I love to go to my cousin’s house and see everybody, but there is no place like home.” She pulls out a kitchen chair and settles herself down. “Tell me what’s going on. Have you arrested anybody for that Wilkins man’s murder?”
I tell her tha
t the holidays make it hard to investigate a crime.
“You don’t think Margaret killed her husband, do you?”
“I can be perfectly honest with you when I say I don’t have a clue. But I agree with you that she’s hard to read.”
She brightens. “You want me to talk to Connie, find out if she has any ideas?”
“No, don’t do that. Let it alone.”
“Something’s different,” she says. “Did you get a haircut?”
“No. Same old me.” Except for a sudden complication in the ladylove department, which I hope to keep secret from Loretta for a little while, anyway. I swear, Loretta should be in the Homeland Security Department. Potential terrorists wouldn’t stand a chance of keeping their plans secret.
Suddenly Dusty yips.
“What is that? Sounds like a puppy.”
I get up and head into the bedroom and come back with the wriggly little bundle. “This is Dusty.”
For once Loretta is speechless.
“I found him and I’ve taken a liking to him.” I hear the defensiveness in my voice.
“What do you mean found him?”
“Out in the woods near where Wilkins was found.” I tell her the story of finding the bitch and the mystery of what happened to the other pups. “Keep your ears open. If anybody suddenly has unexplained puppies around, I want to know.”
“As long as they’re being taken care of, what difference does it make?”
I don’t want to tell her I’m worried that whoever took them might be involved in some way with either dognapping or dogfighting. “I need to know, that’s all.”
“He is cute, but what in the world are you going to do with a dog?”
“What do you mean what am I going to do with him? Same thing everybody does with a dog. He’ll be my companion.”
She snorts. I tell her to hold on while I take him outside. When I come back she says, “What does your cat think about him?”
“She likes him. At least as much as she likes anybody.”
“Dusty is a good name for him. He looks like he’s been rolling in the dust.”
“That’s what I thought.” Although I’m not the one who named him.
She gets up. “I better get on home. Travel is harder than it used to be. I’m tired and I need to get the laundry done.” At the door she turns and says, “One thing you better know. I am not going to babysit for that dog. You better ask Ellen if you need somebody to do that.”
As soon as she leaves, my cell phone rings, startling me. I’ll never get used to having it ring in my pocket. “Maria, what did you find out?”
“There was an open house today for the Wilkins’s home. The real estate agent said an offer might be coming in, but she confided in me that she didn’t think the offer would cover the mortgage cost.”
I smile to myself. One of the talents I’ve found that Maria has is that she can get anyone to talk to her. I’m not sure if it’s because she intimidates them or makes them feel safe. And she keeps what she knows to herself unless it’s relevant to an investigation.
“How much is it on the market for?”
“Just under a million. It’s a nice house, but nothing grand.”
“Do you mind staying there until tomorrow? There’s something else I want you to check up on.” I tell her I’d like her to look up real estate in Lewis Wilkins’s name. “His wife seems to have let him take care of their business dealings, and didn’t ask many questions. It’s possible he had some holdings she was unaware of.”
I’m surprised when Maria calls back within the hour. “Looks like you were right.”
“About what?”
“Dr. Wilkins did own other property.” There’s triumph in her voice, and I imagine her fierce expression. “I figured if Wilkins was using the agent for one house, he might have used him to sell other property. So I went back and asked the agent if Wilkins had recently sold anything through him, and sure enough he had.”
“What was it?”
“Land out near the river. Small piece of property. And get this: It was in his name only.”
“How did that happen?”
“The agent didn’t know that. He said he didn’t ask; that it wasn’t his business.”
“How much did Wilkins get for it?”
“Fifty thousand.”
Maria tells me that the deal was a quick one because Wilkins owned it without a loan, and that the buyer paid cash for it.
Maria will stay over until tomorrow to check if there was other property in Wilkins’s name only. “And find out when he bought it,” I say. And then another thought occurs to me. “Also, find out if there is property in the name of Leonard Wilson. I’ll tell you who that is when you get back.”
A few minutes later, I call her again. “There’s something else I’d like you to do. This one will be trickier.” I tell her about the woman who sued Wilkins and the e-mails I found on his computer. “I want to know if we should consider her a suspect. Or someone in her family.”
She doesn’t answer right away. “How am I supposed to do that? I can’t just go over to her house and ask if she happened to kill her doctor.”
“You’ll figure something out. Poke around. Find out how she lives. Anything you find out is more than we know now.”
CHAPTER 18
Monday morning dawns gloomy. It looks like it could rain again. I go down and spend an hour with my cows, taking the time to check their hooves and skin, which I do every Monday. Cows are more delicate than they look, prone to all kinds of exotic diseases that can bring them down before you know it. I’ve brought Dusty with me again and put him in an empty corncrib to keep him safe. A couple of the bolder cows go over to check him out. To my satisfaction, he doesn’t seem perturbed, and neither do the cows when he yips at them in what sounds like excitement.
My plan this morning is to have a talk with Jerry Bodine, the man Lewis Wilkins won the boat from. I wait until eight o’clock and reach him at the number Dooley gave me. He sounds like a jovial man. He tells me he has an appointment at ten, but if I come over now he’ll be glad to chat.
I stop by headquarters and there’s a message from our new mayor, Lester Pierce. Although he has been in office for several months, I still call him the new mayor because he seems to have stalled out on learning the job. He might be in over his head, which is hard to imagine considering we’re a town of only three thousand people and there are no unusual circumstances to make the job particularly hard. I call him back, wanting to get it out of the way.
“What can I do for you, Lester?”
“I’ve been getting some uncomfortable telephone calls from citizens, and I want to know where you stand on finding out who killed that man out at the lake.” He has the high-pitched voice of an old man, though he’s not even forty.
“I’m working on it. But you do understand the Department of Public Safety is responsible for the investigation.” I say this not to duck responsibility, but to try to help him understand the way things work.
“Well what are they doing?”
“As far as I know, nobody has been assigned to it. It takes a while. So I’m doing what I can.”
“That’s more like it. How long do you think it will be before you arrest somebody?”
I can’t help laughing. “Lester, I have no idea. With the holiday, I didn’t get much done. Who is it that’s bugging you for answers? Is it people out at the lake?”
“Them and others.”
I doubt it’s others. And it may only be one person. Nobody likes to be confronted by a frightened citizen, and Lester has proven to be skittish when someone is upset with him.
“Lester, I wish I could tell you I’ve got it all wrapped up, but I’m struggling. The man who was killed is from out of town, and I don’t know much about him except what I got from his family and from Dooley Phillips. They were friends.”
He grunts. “I’d like to have something I can tell people.”
“I’ll let you know as soo
n as that happens,” I say. “I have to go now. I have an appointment with somebody.”
“Suspect?”
“No. Just somebody who might know some answers.”
I hang up before he can start quizzing me on the finer points of my job. Ever since he was elected, I’ve had the feeling that he has a mind to get a younger person on the job. And I may agree with him. But not yet.
Once more I have the problem of what to do with Dusty. I’ll be glad when he’s old enough to come with me and hang around outside or in the truck. On my way to Bobtail to see Bodine, I stop off at the vet and ask them to keep him for a while. I swear when Chelsea takes him away, he gives me an accusing look.
Following Bodine’s instructions, I find the warehouse where the lawnmowers are stored before they are sent off around the country. It’s a handsome building surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire on top. There’s a sign warning trespassers that the property is guarded by dogs, although I don’t see any sign of them.
Bodine meets me out front. He’s a big guy all around, tall and with extra pounds on him. He has an open expression, laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes.
“You have a lot of security here,” I say. “Dogs in addition to that fence? You have a problem with theft?”
He laughs. “We did until we put up the fence with that phony sign.”
“You don’t have dogs?”
“Not anymore. Tried that and they were more trouble than they were worth. I was afraid somebody would try to break in and get attacked and turn around and sue us.”
He leads me to a small office, sparsely furnished and kept in good order. He tells me it was his father-in-law’s office. “Chuck sold the business to the employees, but he had me stay on as manager. After he died, I’m proud to say the new board told me they’d be glad to have me continue.”
I sit down in a metal folding chair in front of his desk. It creaks as I sit down.
“Sorry about the cheap chair. I thought Chuck took being frugal a little too far, but I guess it rubbed off ’cause I haven’t bothered to replace the furniture.” He settles into a more comfortable desk chair that may at one time have been more expensive, but the leather is cracked and the arms worn down. “Now what can I do for you?”