Owls Well That Ends Well

by Donna Andrews

  Spike was exiled to his pen beside the barn, though they’d shut the doggie door we’d installed in the barn wall, which would have let him go inside to spy on the crime scene. He seemed bored, and almost glad to see me. At least he only bit me once while I was snapping the leash onto his collar, and even that was rather perfunctory. The Doberman and the pit bull, who’d been cowering at the far side of the pen, looked quite relieved to see him go.

  “Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” came Horace’s amplified voice. “We’d like you to step back behind the short outer fence. Please step behind the outer fence, or Meg won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

  Titters ran through the crowd, and rose to a crescendo when I appeared, half-pulled by the eager Spike. When we’d opened up the sale, we’d simply moved part of the outer fence aside. I made sure the ends were closed off so Spike couldn’t escape, leaving a long crescent-shaped area for him to run in. I lifted him inside and let him have the full length of the leash. He lunged toward the nearest people who’d ignored Horace’s command, barking and snarling in his best Exorcist fashion. Only my weight at the other end of the leash slowed him enough to keep the first few malingerers from being bitten, and after that, people got the message. As Spike hurtled along, the path cleared magically before us. Well, before him. A few people stepped back in after we passed, but when we got to the far end of the run, I undid the leash and declared open season on anyone who ignored Horace’s very reasonable request. Spike quickly cleared the open space and then trotted up and down inside, defending his territory against invaders.

  “That should work,” Horace said. “See, I told you Meg would know what to do,” he added to the other officer, as they headed back to the gate.

  “Just give us our yard sale back as soon as possible,” I huffed after them.

  Michael spotted me, and came over to talk through the fence.

  “Great idea,” he said. “And I promise, I won’t tell Mom what you’re doing with her dog.”

  “She said he needed more exercise,” I said, still panting. “Best exercise in the world, running. Look how lean and fit greyhounds are. You seem to have everything under control.”

  “We should be finished with the customers in half an hour,” he said. “Then I thought I’d take your mother into town to keep her entertained—want to come?”

  “Keep her entertained how?” I asked. Call me suspicious, but I had a hard time imagining what entertainment Mother could find in Caerphilly. The town didn’t have that many elegant shops and restaurants to begin with, and she’d already exhausted the charms of those in the past week while staying with us.

  “She has some new ideas for decorating the house,” he began.

  I winced.

  “I’m not in the mood to talk about decorating with Mother,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “If you want to take her, that’s fine; just please don’t bring back any stuff right now. I’m not sure I could take adding any more clutter before we get rid of all the junk that’s already here for the yard sale.”

  “She was talking about paint colors,” he said. “I don’t think that’s apt to involve much clutter.”

  “Paint’s fine,” I said. “I like paint. We could decorate entirely with paint. If we painted the various rooms with really beautiful colors, we wouldn’t even need all that much furniture. Just elegant, uninterrupted expanses of color.”

  “Uh … right,” Michael said. “I’ll tell her to suggest some nice self-sufficient colors. If you’re not interested in going, maybe I can just drop her off and pick her up later.”

  “She should be used to that,” I said. “It’s what Dad always does. And I really think someone should stay here to keep an eye on things.”

  “And snoop,” Michael said, nodding.

  “I’m not snooping,” I said, in as dignified a manner as I could manage.

  “Well, maybe you should start,” he said. “I like Chief Burke, but I have this sinking feeling he’ll take the path of least resistance and arrest Giles, and even if the attorney gets him off, it won’t help his career any.”

  “Or yours,” I said.

  “True,” Michael said. “Though my career’s not as important as clearing Giles.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But it all amounts to the same thing, so I plan to provide the police with whatever unofficial assistance I can.”

  “Good,” he said. “Happy snooping. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  With that, he returned to inventorying the departing customers’ junk collections and I headed back to the house.

  I found Barrymore Sprocket and several of my relatives sitting around the makeshift kitchen table, eating hamburgers and mountains of potato salad while Rob doled out Popsicles to Superman and Darth Vader.

  “This interruption won’t help the yard sale,” Barrymore said, through a mouthful of burger. “Weeks of preparation and advertising, all at great expense, and now this!”

  “Yes, I’m so sorry,” I said. “If I’d been thinking, I would have scheduled the murder for some other weekend.”

  “Rescheduling the yard sale will double the expenses,” Sprocket grumbled. And diminish the Sprocket pirates’ haul, since they took their ten percent of the net profits.

  “Actually, this will probably help the yard sale,” Rob said, as he unwrapped a grape Popsicle for himself. “No amount of advertising could possibly match the publicity value of a really juicy murder.”

  He’d been saying that a lot recently—repeating something I’d said to him, some months before, when a murder had occurred on the premises of his computer game company. He’d become convinced that the notoriety of the murder had contributed significantly to the success of Lawyers from Hell II, the game they’d released shortly thereafter. I made a mental note to drop by his office and see if his muttering about the publicity value of homicide was making any of his employees nervous.

  For now, I let Barrymore Sprocket ponder Rob’s words while I headed for the stairs. With all those people sitting around the kitchen, I’d probably need to snag the dumbwaiter at the top of its route, in the master bedroom. Even my family might start asking questions if I disappeared into the basement for several hours.

  As I passed the dining room, I could hear the chief talking to someone, but the old plaster walls were thick and reasonably sound-resistant. In the living room I saw a random collection of witnesses and suspects, some in costume and others in civilian clothes. About half of them were sprawled on the floor, while the other half stood, leaned, or paced up and down the room, all under the watchful eye of a police officer.

  Upstairs, I slipped into the master bedroom, closed the door, and tiptoed over to open the dumbwaiter door. I’d hoped that the sound would travel up the shaft. It did, but not well enough for me to hear more than one word in ten. The intermittent hammering from the roof didn’t help, either. Ah, well—I hadn’t expected it to be that easy.

  When we’d found the dumbwaiter, during one of our tours of the house before buying, I’d considered it a useless though harmless toy. But Michael had been enchanted, and now I was glad he’d spent an entire afternoon replacing its frayed ropes—one of the few actual repairs the house had received so far.

  When I tried tugging the rope, I did find myself wishing Michael had oiled the pulley at the top while he was at it. But the pulley was way up in the attic, and I hoped if Chief Burke heard its squeak, he’d just mistake it for part of the hubbub outside. Or, more likely, assume we had bats in our belfry literally as well as figuratively.

  I pulled the dumbwaiter up, slowly, so it wouldn’t bang around in the shaft. On the third try, I found a way to fit myself in the dumbwaiter and still leave my arms free to reach outside and tug on the ropes. Luckily for me it was an oversized dumbwaiter. I wondered if in some bygone era the Sprockets had been legendary for the size and splendor of their dinner parties—I had a hard time imagining even a restaurant needing a dumbwaiter quite so large.

  I lowe
red the dumbwaiter, hand over hand, until its top was only a foot above the bottom of the door, which gave me as little distance as possible to cover if I had to get out of sight quickly. I could still hear fine. And while the doors that opened from the shaft into the dining room were closed, they didn’t fit all that well, and the right panel had a number of cracks and splits, so I could even see out, though at the moment the only thing in my field of vision was the chief’s leather coat, slung over the back of one of the folding chairs.

  Apparently I arrived in the middle of an interesting interrogation.

  “And you expect us to believe that!” the chief exclaimed.

  Chapter 13

  Believe what? I wanted to shout. But whoever Chief Burke was questioning didn’t answer, and the chief’s favorite interrogation technique was to sit and stare reproachfully at his subjects until they threw up their hands and talked. Which worked a lot of the time, but wasn’t very amusing for anyone trying to eavesdrop.

  Or perhaps he was interrogating someone with a hearing problem. Perhaps, even now, penetrating questions, harsh accusations, and frantic denials were flying back and forth at breakneck speed in sign language. Just as I began to imagine the killer blurting out a halting confession with trembling, exhausted fingers, a voice broke the silence.

  “I don’t know what else you want,” an unknown man said. “When I realized I was wasting my time, I told him to call me when he was serious about doing business, and I left. That’s it.”

  “And Mr. McCoy was still alive when you left.”

  “Alive and well.”

  The other man’s voice sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put a name or a face to it. I peered out, and saw the crisp black shoulder of the chief’s shirt. Then the shoulder shifted, and I caught a glimpse of the giant sombrero I’d seen one of Gordon’s barn visitors wearing.

  “These papers he wanted to sell you—were they valuable enough that someone else would kill him for them?”

  “Since I never got to see them, I have no idea,” Sombrero said. “I can’t imagine that they would be. Where would Gordon have gotten something that valuable?”

  The voice was precise, dry, and slightly pedantic; it teased my memory.

  “And there’s no one who had a reason to kill him?” the chief asked.

  “From what little contact I had with him, I can imagine there might be all sorts of people with ample reason to kill him,” Sombrero said, sounding slightly testy. “But I’m afraid I have no idea who could have done it.”

  “And there’s nothing else you can think of that might help us?”

  Silence. I assume Sombrero must have shaken his head, or perhaps shrugged.

  Chief Burke sighed.

  “Thank you, Professor Schmidt,” he said.

  Professor Schmidt. I remembered him now. One of Michael’s colleagues at the English department. One of the stuffier ones he avoided. Okay, I could probably find a way to run into Professor Schmidt again if I wanted to find out more.

  “Is that all?” Schmidt asked.

  “I’ll call you if we think of anything else. Show him out, Sammy.”

  I heard the folding chair scrape across the floor and a depressing number of boards that squeaked as Sammy and Professor Schmidt walked over them. I wished I had room to take out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe. I needed to make a note to find out how to fix squeaking floorboards.

  “He could have done it,” a slightly hoarse tenor voice said. “He clearly hated the victim.”

  “Sammy, Sammy,” the chief chided, softly, in his musical baritone. “Everyone hated him. We wouldn’t have standing room in the jail if we arrested everyone who hated him. But this isn’t an Agatha Christie novel. They didn’t all gang up and stuff him in that blasted trunk. Bring in that ex-partner of his.”

  More squeaking. Squeaking door hinges, too, as Sammy ushered the ex-partner in.

  “Ralph Endicott,” the partner said, introducing himself to the chief. Again I wished I could scribble in my notebook, as Endicott rattled off his address and phone number. Never mind. Caerphilly was a small town. If he wasn’t in the book, someone I know would know where to find him.

  “Tell us what you were doing here today,” the chief said. “And how you happened to be in the barn with the deceased.”

  I heard the folding chair creak slightly, and I suspected Chief Burke had leaned back, lacing his hands over his slightly rounded belly and staring at Endicott with halfclosed eyelids. I’d been on the receiving end of the chief’s interrogation technique myself some months ago.

  “The yard sale,” Endicott said. “I was here on business.”

  “You were selling things?”

  “No, buying things,” Endicott said, with just a hint of impatience in his voice. “For my shop. Yard sales are good hunting grounds for anyone who sells antiques, as I’m sure you know. After all, why do you think Gordon was here?”

  “For your shop, yes,” the chief said. “This would be a new shop? I understand that when you and Mr. McCoy parted company this past November, he kept the shop the two of you had been running.”

  “That’s true,” Endicott said. “His name was the only one on the lease. Careless of me, but what could I do?”

  “And you didn’t resent that?”

  “Enough to kill him, you mean? Certainly not,” Endicott said. “I resented it at the time, of course, but from what I’ve heard recently, the owner’s planning to jack the rents up sky-high when the leases are up. Ironically, Gordon did me a favor, hanging onto the shop.”

  “So where have you opened up your new shop?” the chief said. “The one you were buying things for. I don’t recall seeing it yet.”

  “That’s because I haven’t opened it yet.”

  “Having trouble finding suitable premises?”

  “I can find plenty of suitable premises, thank you,” Endicott said. “Frankly, I don’t want to open my new business until I’m sure I’m well and truly rid of Gordon. Purely in a business sense, of course.”

  “Oh?”

  “The man was a total sleazeball,” Endicott said, his voice growing slightly heated. “If I’d known what he was like, I’d never have gone into business with him in the first place. I haven’t been actively involved in the shop for two years, and I sold him my interest outright a year ago, and yet every time I turn around someone’s filing another suit against him and naming me as a codefendant. Not to mention the bill collectors.”

  “Seems like a motive for wanting to get rid of him,” Chief Burke said. “Dead, he can’t do anything else that’ll get people fired up to sue him.”

  “Dead, he’s not earning any more money to pay judgments,” Endicott said. “I suspect some of the plaintiffs will try to come after me instead.”

  “So you’re telling me you’re actually worse off with him dead?”

  “I could be,” Endicott said.

  “So why did you go into business with him, if he’s such a disreputable character?” the chief asked.

  Endicott sighed.

  “I didn’t realize then how disreputable he was,” he said. “I only saw his good qualities.”

  “And those were?” the chief asked.

  I was curious, myself.

  “He was brilliant, in his own way,” Endicott said, his voice sounding oddly melancholy. “He had an encyclopedic knowledge of antiques, collectibles, and especially rare books. That’s how he started out—in books—and then he added other things as he figured out how to make money out of them. And he didn’t just have academic knowledge. He could walk into a room and sort the treasures from the junk at a glance. A phenomenal eye—and the ability to con the owner of a piece into letting it go for a fraction of its value. If he’d just had an ounce of integrity …”

  A pause. I heard the chief’s chair creak.

  “So what were you doing in the barn with him?” he asked.

  Endicott laughed.

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said, his voi
ce returning to its normal tone. “Or in this case, made him a suspect. I wanted to see what he’d found at the sale. I waited till he left and then ducked in.”

  “Just to see what he’d found?” the chief said. “You weren’t appropriating anything for yourself?”

  “Just to see what he’d found,” Endicott said. “One of the few things I miss about having Gordon around was that he had an uncanny knack for spotting trends before anyone else. If he was stockpiling something, that probably meant he expected the value to soar. Or, if he was passing up something that looked hot, it might mean the bottom was about to fall out of that particular section of the market. So I was snooping in Gordon’s stash. He came in and caught me at it.”

  “Thought you were stealing, did he?” the chief said.

  “Oh, he knew what I was doing,” Endicott said. “Had himself a good laugh at my expense. I said a few unpleasant things in return, and left.”

  “And you have no idea who might have killed him?”

  Silence, but I assumed Endicott must have shaken his head, because I heard the chief sigh.

  “That’s all for now, then,” he said. “I’ll be in touch if I think of more questions.”

  “Oh, come now,” Endicott said, over the scraping sound the folding chair made as he stood up. “Don’t you mean when you think of more questions?”

  It didn’t sound as if he waited for Sammy to show him out. The floor squeaked, the door opened and closed, and Chief Burke sighed again.

  “Sad, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Sir?” Sammy said.

  “For a man to quit this earth in the prime of his life and leave behind nothing but enemies,” the chief mused. “That’s a sad, sad thing.”

  “Well, sir,” Sammy said. “Maybe if he hadn’t made so all-fired many enemies while he was here on this earth, no one would have been in such a hurry to help him quit it.”

  “An excellent point, Sammy,” the chief said. “And let that be a lesson to us all. So who else have we got out there?”

  Sammy answered, but I didn’t catch what he said. Just as he was speaking, the dumbwaiter lurched, banged against the side of the shaft, and jerked up a foot.