The mayor stepped back hastily.
The chief opened his hand to give the mayor his badge.
“I hereby offer you my resignation,” he said.
“I’m not accepting it,” the mayor said. He backed a few more steps away.
“Let me rephrase that,” the chief said. “I quit. Effective immediately.”
He put the badge down on Louise’s desk and took a step back. The mayor stared at the polished gold shield as if he expected it to turn into a rattlesnake.
“Sammy?” The chief’s eyes were still on the mayor.
Sammy, who had been staring in openmouthed astonishment, blinked once or twice and then snapped to attention.
“Yes, sir!” he said.
“Go call Debbie Anne and give her the news,” the chief said.
“Yes, sir!” Sammy saluted and dashed out.
The mayor recovered his voice and uttered a few obscenities.
“I’ll thank you to mind your language,” the chief snapped.
“I don’t need you to teach me manners!” the mayor shouted.
“You darn well need someone to,” the chief said. “A public official should have more respect for himself and the citizens.”
I had the feeling the chief had wanted to say something like that for years.
The chief turned to me.
“That’s a mighty big plant,” he said. “Let me help you with it.”
“I’ve got a luggage carrier,” I said.
We both glanced down at the crumpled metal frame.
“But I don’t think it’s going to work very well,” I went on. “I’d appreciate the help.”
“You can’t do this!” the mayor shrieked.
“I just did,” the chief said. “Let’s lift with our knees, not our backs,” he added to me. I suppressed a chuckle at the thought of how many times his wife had probably told him the same thing.
“Don’t abandon me!” the mayor wailed.
“One. Two. Three. Lift!” the chief said.
The mayor continued to shriek threats and pleas as we lugged the plant out of his office and down the hallway. Halfway to the elevator, the shouts were replaced by thuds, the occasional sound of breaking glass, and more bursts of language nearly as blue as the macaw’s. The chief frowned and his jaw muscle twitched a little.
I kept thinking that I should say something, but I couldn’t think what, so I saved my wind for hauling. By the time we got the ficus down to the part of the sidewalk where the garden club ladies were staging the plants, I was profoundly glad the chief had offered to help. I could have done it myself, but I’d have regretted it for days—in fact I probably still would.
A small knot of lavender-hatted ladies greeted our arrival with cheers.
“Excellent!” one said. “You braved the lion’s den.”
“Not without cost,” I muttered. “I’m afraid your luggage cart is a goner. And there’s a big spider plant in the third-floor elevator lobby that needs to be brought down.”
“I’ll go!” Several ladies began dashing up the courthouse steps.
“Let’s just label this so we know where it came from,” another lady said.
She slapped an adhesive label on the pot and, with a triumphant flourish, wrote “Mayor’s Office” on it in elegant printing that could almost pass for calligraphy.
“Now all we have to do is get them in the truck,” one of the ladies said. The others began rolling up their sleeves and looking determined.
Who had chosen this crew to tackle the town hall’s plants, anyway? Not a one of them was over five foot two or under seventy.
The chief and I exchanged looks.
“Let us help you with that,” he said. “Meg, you get in the truck. I’ll lift them in and you can shove them into place.”
The garden club ladies didn’t argue much. In fact, as soon as they saw we were hard at work, they went into a brief huddle and then told us they were going to move on to the next building.
The chief and I lifted and shoved for a few minutes in silence. Then a thought occurred to me. I straightened up and looked around to make sure no one else was hovering nearby before sharing it with the chief.
“I’m not trying to interfere with your investigation,” I said. “But I was wondering—”
And then I stopped. Technically, the chief wasn’t the chief anymore. What happened to the investigation?
“Don’t worry,” he said, as if reading my mind. “It’s still my investigation.”
“In spite of your resignation?”
“I’m still deputy sheriff, remember?” he said.
“But this crime’s in town,” I said. “What if the mayor appoints a new police chief? Not that I’m paranoid, but the mayor’s a suspect. Do we really trust anyone he appoints to investigate properly?”
“No,” he said. “And since I knew things might come to a head between me and the mayor before too long, I went out to the sheriff’s farm last night, and we had a good long talk. He tells me that in the event the town doesn’t have a police chief, he has the authority to assume jurisdiction over the case.”
And since the sheriff, who was in his mid-nineties, was more or less an elected figurehead these days, delegating everything to his deputy, that meant the chief would still be in charge.
“If he’s correct—” I said.
“It occurred to me to wonder about that,” he said. “Sounds more like the sort of thing they used to do back in his heyday, twenty years ago.”
“I think his heyday was more like forty years ago,” I said. “And that’s probably how they did things. Of course, maybe it was legal back then.”
“I like to know where things stand,” he said. “So this morning I ran the whole problem by the county DA. And she assures me that the sheriff is right. As long as there’s no police chief, the sheriff’s department has jurisdiction. No police chief, and for that matter, no police.”
“Your officers are all resigning, too?”
“Most of them don’t have to,” he said. “Most are already on the county payroll, and the rest will be by Monday morning.”
“You were planning to resign, then?”
He sighed.
“Not so much planning to resign as resigned to the fact that sooner or later, the mayor would force me to. So we came up with a plan, just in case. And the DA’s plotting out all the legal strategies she can use if the mayor tries to appoint a puppet.”
I nodded. I had every confidence that the DA could find a lot of ways to delay things. Still—the sooner the chief could solve the case, the better.
“Getting back to the case,” I said. “Did you ever manage to track down Louise? The mayor’s secretary?”
“The one you suspect of helping Mr. Blair get his hands on that copy of the contract?” He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. I wasn’t sure if he found my question interesting, or if he just welcomed the excuse to take a break.
“I’m not sure I really suspect her,” I said. “She sounded sincere when she said that no matter how much she hated her boss, she wouldn’t do that to him. But maybe she fooled me, and even if it wasn’t her, she might have a good idea who else would have had access.”
He nodded.
“That thought had occurred to me as well,” he said. “And I have been trying to reach Ms. Dietz all day. Without success.”
My stomach did a somersault at hearing that.
“Maybe she’s making a run for it,” I suggested. “Or—what if she knows too much and someone decided they needed to get rid of her, too.”
“Annoying as it is not to be able to reach her, I think it’s a little early to jump to that conclusion,” the chief said. He put his handkerchief away and squatted to pick up another plant. “Maybe she just likes to spend her Sundays doing something other than sitting indoors by her telephone.”
“Yes, but don’t you think it’s a little odd that she apparently cleared off her desk and turned in her keys?”
He put the plant down again and turned to me with a frown.
“You’re sure of that?”
“That’s her desk in the mayor’s anteroom,” I said. “He was complaining before you arrived that he’d left her a message to come in and she hadn’t shown up. I think he assumes she’s in on the evacuation, and maybe she is. But according to him, her desk was cleared off by eleven last night. And I don’t even think the Fight or Flight Committee had made its decision by that time, much less sent out the word. She must have come down here straight from the meeting.”
“Maybe she thought she saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to waste no time,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “But last night when she left the barn, she didn’t look like someone who was making a bold decision to risk her job on a principle. She just looked miserable and scared. Maybe she made a run for it. Or maybe whoever killed Parker didn’t give her the chance.”
The chief studied me for a few moments with a faint frown on his face. Then he pulled out his cell phone and hit a few keys.
“It’s me,” he said. “Can you get the word out to all our officers that I want to talk to Ms. Louise Dietz?… That’s right.… No, just wanted for questioning. For now … Thanks. No, I’m down at the town—I’m down at the county courthouse. I should be back soon.”
He hung up, stuffed the phone into his pocket, and went back to loading the neatly labeled plants. But I thought I could see a little more haste in his manner.
“County courthouse,” I said. “I like that better than town hall.”
“It’s what we should have been calling it all along,” he said. “Blasted Pruitts!”
About ten seconds after we finished loading the last plant, the smallest and most elderly of the garden ladies trotted back down the sidewalk, beaming with delight.
“Finished so soon?” she trilled. “Wonderful!”
The chief and I watched as she dug into a straw purse, fished out an enormous cluster of keys, and hopped nimbly into the high cab of the truck.
“Thanks again!” she called as she drove off, shifting the truck’s gears as effortlessly as if she drove it every day. For all I knew she did.
“I’d better get back to the station,” the chief said. “Thanks for the information on Ms. Dietz.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The way voter sentiment is running right now, the mayor will probably be recalled long before he has a chance to appoint a puppet.”
“Yes. I understand they already have a couple hundred signatures on the recall petitions,” he said. “And frankly, even if the mayor does hire a puppet in spite of the DA’s efforts, I’ll still be investigating the assault on your grandfather, which definitely happened in the county, not the town. We’ll manage.”
“You bet we will, Chief,” I said.
“Deputy Sheriff, you mean.”
I tried it on for size.
“No,” I said. “You’ll always be the chief to me.”
He smiled, nodded, and left.
Chapter 22
I decided to make my own escape before the garden club ladies returned with more backbreaking work. I headed for the police station parking lot to collect my car.
As I walked, I fretted over what I’d learned—and how very much we still didn’t know. If things were normal, I might have been able to shove the whole thing out of my mind. I’d have reminded myself that the chief, a very smart man and a seasoned homicide investigator, was on the case. And that I had two four-month-old sons at home who needed me a lot more than any investigation did.
But things weren’t normal. How much of his time could the chief spend on the murder case, and how much was he being pulled away to referee squabbles like the one between the mayor and me? For that matter, how much time had he and his officers spent packing up the police station when they needed to be working on their investigation? And next there’d be the unpacking, and then the inefficiencies and delays that always happen when you’re working out of a different space—even a perfect space, which Mother and Dad’s barn most certainly was not. And who knew what would be happening in town tomorrow when the workweek began and the lender found out that instead of paying the interest on its loan, Caerphilly was sticking them with a collection of well-used buildings full of ghastly oil paintings?
If I could think of anything that might help, I’d have done it, even if it got me in trouble with the chief for interfering. But try as I might, I came up empty.
The sun was setting. Part of me wanted to go home and cocoon with the twins. And part of me wanted to stay in town, help with the evacuation, and keep my ears open for stray bits of information that might prove useful.
I decided to compromise. I’d return to the library, do a little bit of packing or maybe only offer to haul a few boxes in my car. Then I’d drop by to pay a brief visit to Grandfather on my way home.
So after phoning home to make sure Timmy and the twins were doing okay with Michael, I headed back to the library.
Around nine in the evening, I was still doggedly packing books when I got a call from Dad.
“Meg? Are you still in town?”
“Unfortunately.” I stood up and winced. “I got caught up in the library packing, but we’re nearly finished.”
“Could you give me a ride home?” he asked. “I’m still helping out at the police station. Your brother could take me, but he has to head out now, and I was rather hoping to stop by the hospital one more time.”
“Of course,” I said. “Want me to pick you up now?”
“No, the chief can drop me off when we finish up here. Your grandfather’s in room 242—I’ll meet you there.”
“Roger.”
I felt a pang of guilt. I’d meant to drop by the hospital hours ago. And for all my complaining about how the twins tied me down, I realized I was missing them terribly after a day spent running around without them.
I hunted out Ms. Ellie and apologized for not staying till the bitter end. Then I drove the few blocks over to the hospital.
It might have been faster to walk. I had to pass by the town hall on my way, and the crowds and traffic were worse than ever. In fact, about halfway through the slow crawl around the town square, I turned off on a side street and began picking my way through the less crowded outskirts of town. Taking the long way round would probably save time, and the longest route I could possibly imagine would only take me twenty or thirty blocks out of my way.
My detour led me past the bus station and nearby, the dark building that held Parker Blair’s furniture store. I found myself thinking how remarkably close it was to the town hall. It would have been easy for Louise, Mayor Pruitt, Terence Mann, or anyone else working late at the town hall to slip away long enough to kill Parker and then return without anyone being the wiser. Given the elevator’s snail-like pace, one of them could easily stretch a supposed trip to the basement vending machine area to fifteen or twenty minutes. And that was assuming there was anyone around keeping close enough tabs that they had to explain their absence.
And the whole bus station area seemed short on both pedestrians and streetlights. Not hard to imagine Parker’s killer skulking along these rather run-down sidewalks without being spotted.
A pity Mayor Pruitt hadn’t included this part of town in the ruinously expensive beautification campaign. Of course, why would he? None of his family owned property here.
I almost hoped the mayor turned out to be the killer. The tabloids would love it—“Town Elects Psycho Killer as Mayor!”—but it would certainly make the recall campaign much easier.
The hospital and its parking lot were reassuringly bright by comparison. I realized my shoulders were tense and hunched. I didn’t normally stress out that much about driving through the bus station area—after all, I’d lived for many years outside Washington, D.C., and driven through neighborhoods that made the worst block in Caerphilly look like a garden spot.
Of course I’d never knowingly driven past
a murder site in any of those neighborhoods. Or had to contemplate which of my acquaintances might be the killer.
Then again, maybe my tension wasn’t due to my route but my destination. I felt my shoulders tightening even more as I crunched across the gravel of the parking lot toward the hospital entrance.
“I hate hospitals,” I muttered.
Caerphilly Hospital was better than most, largely because it was smaller than most, and thus a lot less impersonal. They’d been nice to me when the twins were born. But it was still a hospital. I took a deep breath and strode through the entrance.
The front desk was staffed by a woman reading a copy of People. I knew her slightly—one of Randall Shiffley’s many cousins. We waved at each other. Since Dad had already told me Grandfather was in room 242, I didn’t have to ask directions. I pushed the elevator call button. She went back to her magazine.
No one rode up with me in the elevator. I stepped out onto the second floor and looked around. No one else in the hall, which was in some kind of night mode—still well lit, but less glaringly bright than it would have been in the daytime. The layout was much the same as it had been on the third floor, where I’d had my brief stay in the maternity ward in December. To my right, the corridor continued a little way. Then, after the nurses’ station, it made an abrupt left turn. To my left, it continued on much farther. Room 242, I realized, would be near the end of the corridor.
Why so far from the nurses’ station? Then I realized that his room would be directly over the ER, and only a short flight of steps or a quick trip in the service elevator away from whoever was on duty there. Maybe that was their usual place to put patients who were no longer on the ICU but still needed watching.
Or perhaps, even unconscious, my grandfather was enough of a troublemaker that the nurses wanted him as far away from them as possible.
I could see a nurse sitting at the station. Her head was bent, and she seemed to be reading something under the light of a desk lamp.
I decided to ask her about Grandfather’s remote location. When I’d taken a few steps toward her, she glanced up and I recognized her. One of the two women Corsicans who’d been so visibly upset by Parker Blair’s death. The well-dressed redheaded one. I smiled and searched my memory for her name as I approached the desk.
The Real Macaw Page 22