by D R Lowrey
“Haven’t you been out looking for him? Didn’t you talk to the butler yesterday?”
“I did, but not about Mr. Sandoval. What’s this about Mr. Sandoval? Is the butler trying to pin the murder on him?”
“Mr. Sandoval has been missing for over a day,” said an increasingly distraught Mrs. Sandoval. “The butler was supposed to tell you. I thought you were searching for him.”
“I know nothing of this. We are here for that butler, Mr. Nigel Blandwater-Cummings.”
“You can come in and wait. He’s out just now.”
“What? He’s out? Out where?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“So, Mr. Sandoval disappeared and now the butler is missing. This is very suspect. I will have my man call this in immediately.” The detective stretched his neck to view the motley gathering around the casket. “So, what’s going on here? A party?”
“A funeral for that dead man. Come in and join us. The more, the merrier, but we need to get on with it.”
“Very well,” said the detective. “This is Officer Blake and Officer Boykin. I promise we’ll be unobtrusive.”
The officers took up positions behind the crowd as they faced the casket and Breadbox at the center of the entrance hall.
Mrs. Sandoval rejoined the crowd and commanded, “Step on it, Breadbox.”
“We are gathered here today on this solemn occasion,” he enunciated in a loud clear voice, “to mark the passing of this man…this man…” Breadbox gestured toward the man, who offered no response. “Excuse me,” said Breadbox, bending toward Mrs. Sandoval, “what’s this man’s name?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Sandoval. She turned to the crowd. “Anybody know this man’s name?”
“What man?” said Grumps.
“Just a moment,” shouted back the detective, retrieving a paper from inside his trench coat. “Emilio Anguilero.”
“Thank you, Detective,” shouted Mrs. Sandoval. “And just think, that butler said you were good for nothing.” She twirled a pointed finger.
Breadbox looked confused but proceeded. “This man…Emily-o Angle-io, eh, what he said, was, as far as we know, a fine man. We gather here today to commiserate his life. Does anyone have some kind words to say about this man? Anyone?”
Had this been a nighttime event, there would have been crickets. As it was, the grandfather clock stood tall. Tick-tock.
“Anyone at all?” said Breadbox. “Anything? Doesn’t have to be much, a Bible story, perhaps?”
Esmerelda raised her hand.
“You there,” said Breadbox. “Spill it.”
“He was killed on the night of a new moon.”
“Now we’re talking,” said Breadbox. “Killed on the night of a new moon. That tells us something about the man. What does that tell us?”
The listless mourners blinked their eyes and shifted their weight from one leg to the other. Some twice.
“Tells us he weren’t no werewolf,” said Breadbox. Clearly, he was an experienced professional. “We also know he ain’t no vampire ’cause he stayed right there in that coffin. Anything else? Anyone?”
“He had a frog in his mouth,” shouted Mrs. Sandoval.
“And a toad,” added Abuelita.
“This I didn’t even know,” said Breadbox. “Now, that’s some interesting facts. I never know’d anyone died with a frog and a toad in his mouth. I once know’d a dead man had a canary in his mouth, but a frog and a toad? Never. That’s a new one. Wonder what it means?” He stroked his lantern jaw before continuing. “How a man dies can say a lot about how he lived. We find dis man here died the night of a new moon with a pair of reptiles in his mouth. What does this say about the man? I’m going to say it indicates he was a dedicated family man, loved his mother, and was a pillar of da community. How’s dat? And he loved dogs.” He let loose a broad smile, which might have been blinding if not for all the gaps. He then turned to the cadaver and shot him with his finger as if to say, “Gotcha, buddy.”
Turning toward the crowd for the big finish, he continued. “One more t’ing I can say about our dear departed is dat he wasn’t done in with no ball-peen hammer to the head. A pea brain can see that. This is a fine-lookin’ corpse. No ball-peen hammer here. We ain’t morons, is we?”
The question froze the listless crowd. Eyeballs rotated about in their sockets searching for Nigel as they tended to do in this house when imbeciles or morons were mentioned.
“Anyone have anything to add?” asked Breadbox. “Fine. I now, by the power vested in me, declare this man dead and gone to the maker of his choice. Let bygones be bygones. May he rest in peace. Amen.”
****
Nigel had grossly underestimated the time to get there and back. He got up early thinking he needed about three hours. The poor little excavator, which he’d reckoned could go about five miles per hour, must have been clanking along at about three. The entire expedition had taken almost seven hours. Still, it had been worth it.
He turned the tiny excavator off the highway toward the Sandoval estate. A couple minutes later, he steered off the road and into a small clearing where he killed the clattering engine. A gentle breeze rustled through long grass and shuffled fallen leaves as birds sang in the sunshine. Nigel heard none of it. After seven hours of the excavator’s clamorous cacophony, his offended ears had exchanged hearing sounds for generating them. His head vibrated from the inside with an angry buzz.
After dismounting from the bouncy metal insect, Nigel found the solid earth shakier than he had remembered. He reached a palsied hand into his mouth and extracted a bothersome nugget from under his tongue. He placed the foreign body, a crown that had shaken loose a mile back, into his pants pocket.
His bones ached, the world quivered, and his martyred cellphone lay crushed along the shoulder of a country road, and yet, he was elated. He placed a hand on the dirt-encrusted, cast iron pot that was his prize. It had been where old Mr. Sandoval’s back had told him it would be…kind of. That is, once Nigel determined the map pertained not to the current estate but to the old Sandoval house that had been destroyed in a fire many years ago.
Even with that revelation, the search had not been simple. The property was now abandoned, fenced off, and overgrown, with only slabs of cement indicating the former habitation. Nigel had ruled out that 18p dealt with parsecs. That would have required interstellar, warp-speed travel—unlikely for old Mr. Sandoval. He speculated that p meant paces, an imprecise but traditional unit for buried treasure maps.
On site, he matched the bare foundation to the structure on the tattoo. But, after several unsuccessful excavations, he surmised the tattoo might have been directionally flipped. Perhaps the tattooist had been looking in a mirror or had used a reversed stencil. Either way, the treasure lay toward the outer reaches of the pelvis rather than the coccyx.
With this hypothesis, Nigel went to work excavating a broad semicircular swath. At a depth of less than two feet, pay dirt announced itself with a clank. He maneuvered the excavator’s scoop underneath the foreign object and lifted out a dirt-encrusted cauldron—round, black, and mysterious. As it turned out, the pot depicted on the map was not metaphorical, but a close representation of the genuine article. The ancient kettle was capped with a lid, which could not be pried open with fingernails or keys, meaning the contents remained a mystery. The pot was so heavy, he carried it home using the excavator’s scoop as a satchel.
Nigel stood back and admired the pot, not for its physical attributes or its promise of riches, but for the solid detective work it represented. He imagined the excitement to come when he presented the lost treasure to its rightful owners, the Sandovals.
As he remounted his rickety metal insect, a large SUV zoomed past. Behind glass the color of basalt, Nigel could see neither driver nor passenger. However, based on a rhinestone-bejeweled script that stretched from rear wheel to front headlight spelling out the name Cam Logan, he believed the driver to be Cam Logan. If not
Cam Logan, it was Cam Logan’s biggest fan not named Cam Logan.
Cam Logan barreling down this road made no sense. But nothing about her ever did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Old Friends, Dead Friends
Annie had heard of certain unprincipled comics who, hoping to bolster their cachet, salted their audience with paid laughers. Listening to Breadbox’s eulogy, she felt like one of those except she was not getting paid and she was not there to laugh but to mourn. Not a great gig. Since the departed was an unknown quantity, the presented material lacked a certain immediacy, in her opinion. She used the time to consider the unanswered questions surrounding the deceased’s demise. Unfortunately, Breadbox’s eulogy, as entertaining as it was, failed to provide the grist for any new theories. Then, as pallbearers were being sorted, the doorbell rang.
Everyone knew of the butler’s absence because Mrs. Sandoval had made it a theme. The crowd crackled with excitement at the prospect that Nigel, oblivious to his master’s rage, stood behind the door.
With each dingdong, Mrs. Sandoval stiffened but held herself in check, allowing the free flow of rings to underscore the lack of a door-answering butler. Eyes opened wide, tongues licked lips, and hands pressed against hands as the door swung open to expose the victim.
“My goodness, where have you two been?” asked Mrs. Sandoval.
The battle royale would have to wait because standing at the door was, no matter how hard one squinted, not Nigel. Instead, a ragged Mr. Sandoval huffed while a tattered Stanley puffed. The pair looked as though they’d run through a briar patch before being caught by a badger.
“Have you two been out on a bender?” asked Mrs. Sandoval, as if she disapproved.
“Kidnapped,” panted Stanley.
The detective pushed his way through the crowd to secure a more advantaged position. “Kidnapped?”
“Kidnapped by who?” asked Mrs. Sandoval.
“Whom,” corrected Mr. Sandoval.
“Kidnapped by whom?”
“Cam,” said Stanley. “After we left here Saturday evening, she chained me up—”
“Chained you up?” said the detective. “With what?”
Stanley often hesitated to speak up because he feared being the dumbest one in the room. He now paused to commemorate the passing of a baton, then replied, “Chains.”
“Hmmmm,” murmured the detective.
“She chained me up in her car, and later, when she saw Mr. Sandoval, she chained him up.” Stanley paused in case the detective had another question. He did not. “She had us trapped. We escaped this morning.”
“Let me get this straight,” said the detective. “Cam Logan, the female country star, has been holding the two of you against your will? Cam Logan, the one with the golden hair and that mansion up near No Way? The Cam Logan that sings that song, ‘Hydrating for You’? That Cam Logan?”
“No,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “‘Hydrating for You’ was by Lauren Lamb. Cam Logan sang ‘Greasy Backhand’.”
“I thought that was Tammy Gobel,” said Stefanie. “Cam Logan sang, ‘Cocoa Butter Cowboy,’ or was it ‘My Lanolin Lover’?”
“I don’t care who sang what song,” said the detective. “What I want to know is how one small woman could hold two able-bodied men against their will. How old is she? Like fifty-five?”
“Maybe, but she doesn’t look a day over forty-five,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “She probably uses that moisturizer made from platinum dust and goat poop.”
“I don’t care about song titles or moisturizers. I want these two gentlemen to explain how they were held against their will by a middle-aged, female country singer.”
“She’s the spawn of the devil, she is,” said Stanley, sounding like an ancient mariner.
“She’d give that first wife of mine a run for her money, I’ll tell you that,” said Mr. Sandoval.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” cackled Abuelita as her head spun around on its stalk. “Spawn of the devil, my ass. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“Just a minute,” hissed the veiled dragon lady, appearing amongst the crowd like a she-demon sprouting from hell. “I don’t like to hear this term, ‘spawn of the devil’ tossed around in such cavalier fashion. This gutter-slime country singer, Cam Logan, only wishes she were a spawn of the devil. She’s not worth a hellhound’s poop, I assure you of that.”
“I believe that lady knows what she’s talkin’ about,” said Breadbox.
“An Englishman,” said Grumps. “If you want a real spawn of the devil, look for an Englishman. To rid the world of such a menace, you must drive a stake through its heart and that’s just for a start. Any Englishmen here?”
No hands went up.
Grumps huffed.
“We can’t just stand around discussing the devil’s spawn,” said Stanley. “Cam could be coming as we speak. We need to marshal our forces and prepare our defenses. We may not have much time.”
“Calm down,” said the detective. “We have three officers of the law here. A middle-aged, female country singer is hardly a threat. If you wish to file a complaint against her—”
“File a complaint?” said Stanley. “After everything she did to us?”
“What did she do?”
“She chained us to a distilling pot and demanded we hand over a map of some sort. We didn’t know what she was talking about.”
“Right, and what else?”
“She drank wine in front of us and wouldn’t give us any, most of the time.”
“But some of the time she would?”
“Yes, but only a little.”
Annie watched this scene from the shadows while trying to piece things together. The mysteries were certainly stacking up faster than the clues. The big revelation was that Cam Logan knew something about a map and was desperate to get her manicured talons on it. One could only suppose that the map in question was the one on Mr. Sandoval’s torso. But, while Cam knew of a map, she apparently had no idea that it came in tattoo form. How did she know about the map, and did she know what the treasure was? This wasn’t Annie’s case, but she was already envisioning a friendly interrogation of Cam.
“I hates to interrupt this brilliant police work, but we need to get this man buried,” said Breadbox. “I need some pallbearers. Raise your hand to volunteer.”
While Breadbox counted hands and worked out positions, the haggard Mr. Sandoval stumbled up to casket’s edge to view the body. The pallbearers encircled the casket, and Breadbox was poised to close the lid, when Mr. Sandoval said the most interesting thing.
“I know this man.”
One could have heard a pin drop if not for the sound of heads spinning.
Mrs. Sandoval was the first to speak. “How do you know this man? From where?”
“Not sure,” said Mr. Sandoval. “In my past. Not my youth, but sometime later.” He knocked a fist against his dented cranium. “There’re memories in here that don’t want to come out. What’s this man’s name?”
“What was his name again?” called out Mrs. Sandoval.
“It was…give me a moment,” said the detective. “Emilio Anguilero.”
“Doesn’t sound right to me,” said Mr. Sandoval. He bent over to look closely at the corpse’s face. “Does he have a tattoo? On his arm, maybe?”
All eyes looked at all the other eyes. All the other eyes were blank.
“We could look,” said Esmerelda in a spasm of practical thought.
“Good, Essie. Take a look,” said Mrs. Sandoval.
Esmerelda stepped up to the waxy figure in the green pinstripes. She hesitated before backing away. “This seems like police work. Doesn’t the detective know if there’s a tattoo?”
“I don’t catalog tattoos unless they have relevance to a case,” said the detective.
“I believe we’ve established relevance,” said Stefanie. “Go to it, Detective.”
Stepping up to the body, the detective asked, “Which arm?”
“Try t
he left,” said Mr. Sandoval. “Then try the right.”
“His left or my left?”
“Take your pick.”
The left arm revealed nothing. He pulled back the sleeve for the right arm and voila! “A snake,” said the detective.
“No, not a snake,” said Mr. Sandoval. “I remember now. It’s an eel. His name is Anguilero—in Spanish that means something like eel person. He was called Eel. I still can’t place him, but he gives me a bad vibe. Maybe it’s because his name is Eel. Or maybe it’s because he’s dead. Or maybe it’s that suit. I don’t know.” He sat down at the base of the casket stand, rubbed his dented head, and set about to remember a man named Eel.
Mr. Sandoval wasn’t the only one rubbing a body part. The room was alive with stroked chins, scratched scalps, wrung hands, and fingered temples, all for the purpose of unlocking the inner Sherlocks. This revelation, the connection between the long-lost family member and the unknown corpse, had everyone reviewing the facts.
Annie, as one might expect, was a few lengths ahead of the pack. That said, she didn’t have this figured out by a long shot. One now had to wonder about the timing of Mr. Sandoval’s re-entry into society, coinciding as it did with the mysterious murder of an old colleague at the estate. Even more puzzling was the issue of geography. How did two men, acquaintances separated by decades and thousands of miles, turn up unexpectedly at the same location? Coincidence? Sure. Annie would happily drink a toast to such a miracle except for the fact that one had been murdered.
But Annie was not completely clueless. She knew something about this Emilio Anguilero. He had been on the Brazil expedition when Mr. Sandoval disappeared. He was one of two people to submit affidavits declaring their belief that Mr. Sandoval was dead. His help had undoubtedly been solicited by Abuelita’s previous fiancé, the evil lawyer. The same lawyer who’d planned to marry Abuelita, kill her, and claim her inheritance.
Annie had a lot to think about. These new revelations combined with what she already knew placed the crosshairs directly on Mr. Sandoval as suspect number one. On the one hand, she could easily concoct scenarios in which Mr. Sandoval might have had a motive to kill. On the other, she had known many murderers, and Mr. Sandoval wasn’t one. Or, if he was, he was the most brazen and cunning she’d ever come across.