Shepherd's Crook

by Sheila Webster Boneham

We just sat for a few minutes, each lost in our own thoughts. Goldie finally broke the silence. “Janet, that was the guy, right? The one from Dom’s Deli? The buddy of the guy who was killed at Blackford’s?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Why in the world would he be after Councilman Martin?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, “and I have a terrible feeling he got the wrong house.”

  Goldie stared at me for a moment, and then said, “Your car.”

  I nodded. My car was parked in front of Martin’s house because I hadn’t been able to get into my own driveway when we got home earlier. What if the guy had been looking for me, or for the pictures they seemed to think I had? What if he had still been looking for Summer and thought I knew where she was?

  “Janet, what if he comes back?”

  “My thought exactly,” said a masculine voice behind me. Hutchinson stepped into view, squatted in front of us, and stroked Jay’s cheek. “But first things first. Are you all okay?” When he was convinced that we were, he said, “Okay, ladies. I would prefer that you pack up your animals and stay somewhere else until we catch this guy. I can’t make you do that, but … Janet, I think you should go to Tom’s and if he has room, take Goldie and her crew with you.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was explain my romantic troubles to Hutchinson. “Hutch, my mom’s wedding is tomorrow. I can’t, I mean, I need things here, at home.”

  “I’m not leaving my home either,” said Goldie.

  Hutchinson let out an “I-knew-it” sigh. “Okay. I’m posting a car to watch both your houses. Leave your outside lights on, and as many inside lights as you can sleep through.”

  Sleep? He thinks we’ll sleep after all this?

  We answered questions and handed over phone numbers, and Hutch had Officer Mason escort us home. She checked my locks, had me turn on every light in and outside the house, and moved on to Goldie’s house. When she was gone, I lay down on the couch with my feet pressed into Jay’s belly and a cat on each side. I pulled my favorite fleece throw over us and settled in, expecting to replay everything that had happened all night long. The next thing I knew, my phone was vibrating in my pocket and the sun was up.

  seventy-five

  Even the critters slept in Saturday morning until Norm woke us with a phone call at eight-fourteen. He wanted to know what time I would be at Shadetree to help Mom get ready for the wedding. “It’s so cute,” he said. “She’s quite the blushing bride!”

  “I know. I’m really happy for them.” Maybe there’s still hope for me. Not that I aspired to blushing bride status, but the love and happiness were on my bucket list, if I could figure out how to have them and my autonomy, too.

  After I assured Norm that I would be there in plenty of time, I hobbled to the window and looked out. A police car was still parked there, but the street was quiet otherwise. I fed the animals and woke Mr. Coffee up. My ankle loosened up a bit as I walked. It was still swollen, although not as much, but the bruise had blossomed in disturbing shades of purple. I had been planning to wear a pair of two-inch heels that hadn’t been out in public in about three years, but decided I’d better stick with flats. In the meantime, I wanted to see whether Joe had returned to his home behind Blackford’s Farm and Garden and stop by the hospital to check on Phil Martin. I didn’t like the guy, but guilt was eating at me. After all, Zola had probably been looking for me when he was misled by my van in front of Martin’s house.

  Blackford’s was open by the time I got there, but I parked near the back alley, not the door. I had picked up two breakfast sandwiches, a large coffee, and two bottles of water on my way. Even if Joe was still hiding, I felt pretty sure he would pick up the food and drinks if I left them where he would see them.

  The blanket and shower curtain were down over the opening to Joe’s box home, indicating that he might be there. “Joe?” I waited, then tried again. “Joe, it’s Janet. I just wanted to be sure you’re okay.” Nothing. “Okay, well, I was supposed to meet a friend for breakfast, but she didn’t show up. I had already ordered her food, and, well, I didn’t want to waste it, so I’ll just set it here, inside your door.”

  I squeezed between the recycle bin and the wall to get to the alcove, careful not to rub against them, and moved the coverings over Joe’s doorway just enough to set the paper bag inside. I wanted to look inside in case he was in there sick or injured, but couldn’t bring myself to invade his privacy that way. I stood and waited another moment, scanning the alley and listening to a cardinal singing in a nearby tree. Finally I turned around to return to my car and saw Joe entering the alley from the parking lot. I walked toward him and smiled.

  “Hi, Joe.”

  He wore a blue plaid flannel shirt over a red sweater, brown chinos, and high tops. He wasn’t much of a fashion statement, but I was always surprised at how clean and tidy he kept himself under the circumstances. He had a bottle of pop and a Butterfinger in his hands. His hair looked damp, and I guessed that he had made the purchase at the gas station across the road and used their bathroom to clean up.

  Joe had pulled two battered but functional folding chairs out from behind his box for the two of us and he was just digging into his second sandwich when he froze mid-bite. He stared at something behind me, eyes wide. I glanced around and quickly back at Joe. “It’s okay,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Cop?”

  “Yes, a detective. You can trust him.”

  Joe didn’t look too sure about that, but he resumed chewing.

  “Janet, what are you doing here?”

  I interpreted the question to mean “Why are you sticking your nose into police matters again?” but I just smiled and said, “Having breakfast with my friend Joe. What are you doing here?”

  The back door of Blackford’s opened and Ralph Blackford stepped out, a trash bag in his hand. He looked startled to see us, but seemed to grasp what was happening and stayed where he was.

  Hutch held a hand toward Joe and introduced himself. “Joe, we’re looking into a murder committed back here on Tuesday evening. If you have a little time, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “I had to do it!” Joe started to stand, and my heart fell to the pavement.

  Hutchinson’s voice stayed calm and he held his palms toward Joe in a placating gesture. “Whoa, whoa. Let’s slow down.” He squatted beside my chair. I knew the gesture was meant to make him less threatening to Joe, and I was still trying to put that together with Joe’s apparent confession when Hutch spoke again. “What was it you had to do, Joe?”

  “Wait a second.” It was Blackford. “Should Joe have an attorney?”

  Hutchinson smiled at Joe. “You’re not a suspect. I’d just like to know if you saw anything that would help us.” Joe nodded, and Hutch went on. “What was it you had to do, Joe?”

  I held my breath, expecting Joe to confess to Mick Fallon’s murder, although I had no idea why he would have had Evan Winslow’s shotgun.

  “Hit him!” He practically shouted it. “I had to hit him!”

  “What did you hit him with?”

  I noticed that Hutchinson wasn’t taking notes as he usually did. He was looking directly at Joe, something a lot of people don’t do with the homeless.

  “Two-by-four,” said Joe. “I keep it there,” he pointed, “under the dumpster. Just in case.”

  “Joe, who did you hit?”

  “Those bad men, the one that got shot and the other one.” He popped the last of his sandwich into his mouth and chewed hard, staring at Hutchinson. He swallowed and drank some coffee, and spoke again. “One of them is dead.”

  “Yes.” Hutch nodded.

  “I didn’t do that. Not really.”

  Not really? I couldn’t imagine what he meant by that, but Hutchinson just nodded again.

  “Okay. Why did you hit him?�
��

  “Both of them.” Joe picked up his Butterfinger and broke it into four pieces. He laid one on his knee and offered the other pieces to Hutch, Ralph, and me. I begged off, blaming my dentist, and Ralph said he had just eaten, but Hutch took a piece and nibbled the end. Joe studied him for a bit and finally said, “Maybe just one. The one with the gun. They were trying to kidnap that lady.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Hutch, and Joe nodded but didn’t speak. “So you hit him to protect her?”

  “Had to.” Joe squirmed in his chair, and when he spoke again, his voice was very soft. “I didn’t mean to …”

  Hutch waited a beat, and then tried again. “What happened when you hit him?”

  “They didn’t know I was there. I saw them follow that lady to her truck, and she saw them and pulled the gun from the rack, you know, one of those gun racks some trucks have? She was pretty. She had pretty hair.”

  Summer. “Did she have long red hair, Joe?”

  “Black hair, red hair. And she turned around but he shoved her into the side of the truck and her hair almost fell off and he grabbed the gun and the other one said now they had her and and and—”

  Her hair almost fell off? Black hair, red hair? What did that mean? And then it clicked. Summer had worn a dark wig in the picture from Reno. I thought of the woman I had seen going into Phil Martin’s house, the dark-haired one I had thought moved like Summer. I was sure now that it was Summer I had seen.

  If Summer was in this alley with a truck, then Evan knew she wasn’t missing. I thought back to the day we found Rosie the sheep’s grave at the farm. Giselle had thought someone was in the yarn shop, although no one answered her knock. It must have been Summer. I was practically bursting to talk this out with Hutch, but this wasn’t the time or place. Joe needed to finish his story.

  “Okay, and then what happened?” asked Hutch, gently putting the brakes on Joe’s delivery.

  “I crawled through there,” he gestured to the space between the recycle bin and the building, “and hit him with my two-by-four.” Joe swung an imaginary bat. “Whomp! I hit him hard in the back of the legs and he sort of slipped and stumbled and I think he dropped the shotgun and bam! there was an explosion, you know, a blast, and and and—”

  “And he was accidentally shot?”

  Joe shook his head. “The gun shot them.”

  “Them?” Hutch and I spoke at the same time.

  “Yes, but only the one with the gun died. The other was just marked.” Joe looked thoughtful and turned to me and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Some people might say it was an accident, but it wasn’t.”

  Just when I felt hopeful for Joe, my heart took another nosedive, but I whispered back, “What do you mean, Joe?” and held my breath.

  “Angels watch,” he said. “They see what we do and they give us what we deserve. An angel saw what those men tried to do, and caught that gun.”

  seventy-six

  Joe’s theory about angels was still on my mind as I walked into Parkview Hospital and asked for Phil Martin’s room. Based on the number of people already there, you might have thought the guy was well-liked, but the angry voices wafting out the door suggested otherwise. I peeked around the doorframe and tried to sort out the scene.

  Martin was propped up in bed, his face pallid and moist. Tom nodded at me from the far side of the room, and Hutchinson stood near the foot of the bed. A well-coiffed, well-preserved woman maybe ten years my senior owned the loudest of the voices. I had seen her enter the room as I got off the elevator, and now I recognized her from photos and TV news. Martin’s wife. She had her hand clamped around Chelsea’s upper arm and if I hadn’t side-stepped, she would have shoved the younger woman straight into me. “Stay away from him,” she hissed. “You’ve done enough damage.” Then she fixed her angry gray eyes on me and said, “Who are you?”

  Part of me wanted to ask her the same question for etiquette’s sake, but I decided she deserved a break. I offered my hand and said, “Janet MacPhail. I live next door to Councilman Martin.”

  “Former Councilman,” she said, and then her expression shifted from anger to something I couldn’t define, something suggestive of mutual interest. “I’m Anna Martin. You’re the woman with the dogs.”

  “One dog,” I said. “But yes, that’s probably me.”

  “Thank you for saving my husband’s life.”

  “Oh, no, that wasn’t me,” I said. “That was another neighbor, Goldie Sunshine. She stopped the bleeding.”

  She looked confused. “So two women came to his rescue?”

  I smiled at her. “And two dogs, actually. Mine and Goldie’s.”

  She gave me a little nod and turned on her husband.

  “How did you know about this?” I mouthed the question at Tom, watching Anna Martin and her husband from the corner of my eye. Judging by his wife’s posture, I wasn’t sure the Councilman was out of danger quite yet.

  “Goldie called me,” said Tom, moving toward me and, by default, the door. “Maybe we should leave.”

  “No, don’t go.” It was Phil Martin.

  Hutchinson cleared his throat and said, “I just have a few questions, Councilman, but I can come back.”

  Martin dismissed that idea with a wave.

  “Okay, sir. Do you have any idea why you were attacked?”

  Martin shook his head, and his wife jumped in. “They were looking for that woman, the one who was blackmailing you.” Martin seemed to shrink under her glare, and he flinched when she spat, “The red head.”

  Martin’s eyes went wide and what little color was left abandoned his face. “What—”

  “She came to me. To me! For God’s sake, Philip. She wanted money to get away. She told me about your little scheme.”

  Hutch looked at me and I shrugged.

  “Did she show you—”

  Anna sounded like she wanted to spit on Martin. “No, dear, she didn’t show me the photos. She didn’t have to.”

  “What did you, I mean, did you give her—”

  “Money? Not on your life.”

  “But wait,” I said. “Why did she want to leave?”

  Anna gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “Phil wasn’t her first fool. I guess she finally picked one she couldn’t bully with her dirty pictures. Not like this one.” She pointed her chin at Martin and paused as if considering whether to tell us more. “She said there were two men looking for her, employees,” she sneered the word, “of a thug of some sort from Toledo or Cincinnati—”

  “Cleveland,” said Hutchinson.

  “Whatever. She said her own stupid husband got himself in trouble with some unsavory people and they came looking for him. Her bad luck he played poker with a gentleman she conned in Las Vegas.”

  “Reno,” said Hutchinson

  Anna shot him a look. Then she turned back to her husband and said, “You’ve had your fun, Phil. Now grow up. You’re resigning from the Council for health reasons, but first you’re going to withdraw that ridiculous pet limit bill your little friend seduced you into putting forward. You’re getting rid of that house and you’re coming home. And if you see that little tramp again, you’ll wish the shooter had aimed better.” She started to turn, but added, “And you’d better get that little chippy’s bail money back.” She stopped on her way to the door and took my arm. “I’d like to take you and your friend—Goldie, is it?—to lunch one day soon.”

  When she was gone, I turned toward Martin. He looked like he might need a nice big drip bag of morphine.

  “I hear you’re going to be fine,” I said.

  He nodded and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for … well, I’m sorry. Thank you. I wish I could thank your dogs. They …” He sniffed and shook his head.

  “You can thank them,” I said. “Do what your wife asked. Withdraw the bill. It’s a bad law.�
� He nodded but didn’t say anything. I was about to apologize for my role in the attack, which I still thought was a case of mistaking Martin’s house for mine, but he started to speak again. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I don’t know what got into me. Those young women.”

  Hutch and I exchanged a look, but kept quiet.

  “I’m an old fool.” He gave a sad laugh. “Or as Anna says, a stupid dirty old man. They were just so pretty. They made me feel young—” Martin tried to shift himself in the bed, but caught his breath and grimaced. When he could speak again, he said, “Bella. Beautiful Bella. Bella the bitch.”

  Bella Verano. That was one of Summer’s aliases.

  Martin’s tone shifted to a snarl. “And her old man.”

  “Evan?” I blurted.

  “Who’s Evan?” Martin asked. “I’m talking about her husband. Fancies himself a cowboy. Rex something.” Or Ray Turnbull, I thought, before Martin cut me off again. “He’s the muscle, but she’s the dangerous one. She’s the brains.”

  I wanted to stay and hear more, but I had too many errands to run in too little time, so I excused myself as Hutchinson asked Martin what his wife had meant by “little scheme.” I almost turned back when I heard Martin say, “Detective, let me tell you about the crime I almost committed.”

  seventy-seven

  If my mother had ordered a perfect spring day for her wedding, it could have been only slightly more lovely than the one we had. It could have been warmer, but the sky was a pristine robin’s-egg blue so clear it made my heart ache, and the most tentative of breezes swayed the daffodils and tulips and redbuds that were all suddenly in full bloom. Goldie met me and Jay in the driveway. Her colorful skirt and rose-pink peasant blouse set off her silver hair, worn now in a loose upsweep. She carried a book of poems.

  “You clean up pretty good,” she said. “Turquoise is the perfect color for you. And your hair looks great.” She bent to pet Jay. “And you look absolutely dashing in your sparkly bow tie, young man!”

  It felt odd to be going to a wedding without my camera gear, but I wanted to be fully in the moment rather than behind a viewfinder. My colleague Susan Traiger had volunteered to take the photos and send them to me as a wedding gift to Mom and Tony. I checked in with her and Jade Templeton when we arrived. Norm was making last-minute adjustments to the chairs and arbor. “Are you okay, Norm? You looked flushed.”