The Meriwether Murder

by Malcolm Shuman

  “I don’t know,” Esme said. “If we only knew more about him, whoever he is.”

  Shelby Deeds raised a hand.

  “Isn’t there one thing we can be pretty sure of?” he asked.

  “What’s that?” Esme asked, frowning.

  Deeds looked from one of us to the other. “Our mysterious killer is almost certainly a historian.”

  I blinked and Esme said, “Of course.”

  Deeds scratched his cheek. “This sort of thing doesn’t have any value to someone with no interest in history. If it were a question of buried treasure, this person wouldn’t have called Dorcas in Columbia. No, this is someone who knows where to look and what to look for. Someone like …” he smiled over at Esme, the sad eyes suddenly coming alive, “you or me.”

  “Since it was a man,” Esme said, “that only leaves you, Shelby.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose I’d better get my alibis together. But you see what I’m saying.”

  “He’s right,” I told Pepper. “This killer isn’t just some thug. It’s somebody who knows computers and knows research methods. Like a member of the history department.”

  Esme’s dark brows arched. “My colleagues may be a bunch of pompous egomaniacs, but they’re all too comfort ably ensconced in their niches to exert the effort required to commit murder. This is more likely to be the work of some perpetual graduate student, who’s been working on his dissertation for the last ten years and is scared somebody’s going to publish before he can get his thesis approved. Believe me, a desperate graduate student is capable of anything.”

  I smiled. “Any students in your department fill the bill?”

  Esme shrugged. “There’re one or two who’ve made a career of finishing their dissertations. But one’s a woman and the other, who really is a peculiar bird, is doing his on the economic history of rum production in the Indies.”

  “What about Nick DeLage?” Pepper asked. “He’d do anything for a dollar.”

  I nodded. “But somebody would have to put the idea in his head. He’s not what I’d call an historian.”

  “In that case,” Esme said, her face grave, “we have a very serious situation. It means we haven’t met the killer yet.”

  “Or,” Shelby Deeds said, “it’s someone we have met but would never associate with this.”

  “Whatever the case,” I said, “we need to decide how we’re going to work from here. We need to decide who’s going to do what and we need to take precautions.”

  “Agreed,” Deeds said. He picked up a yellow legal pad and began to write. “Here,” he said, holding it up for us to see. “I’ve written down a few of the things that need to be done, if everybody agrees.”

  I looked at the precise, almost calligraphic handwriting.

  “First,” he said, “I’ve made arrangements to drive up to Columbia and talk to Dorcas Drew. I can make the drive in a day, but it means I’ll have to get on the road as soon as we finish here, because there’re some things I need to do at home before I leave in the morning.”

  “I’ll go with you, then,” Esme volunteered, but Deeds shook his head.

  “No. We need you to use your contacts here to get permission from the library to let our expert examine the will.”

  “Ummm,” Esme said. “I do know the archives people pretty well and if you’ll give me a letter, I know your reputation—”

  “I’ll type one up on your computer before I leave,” Deeds said, then turned to Pepper and me. “The other thing is the journals. You have to get permission for our expert to take them for analysis. I understand Miss Fabré has let you borrow them once already.”

  Pepper exhaled. “What do we do about Nick?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Once he sniffs something big, he’ll be looking for money.”

  “Are we obligated to let him in on things?” Esme asked.

  “I don’t see how we can hold it back,” I said. “He has control of the property and we’ll need his cooperation if we do any more work there.”

  “Well, I’ll have to leave that to you,” Deeds said. “Of course, the examination of the documents is just a formality. But we need to be able to show they’re genuine if we expect to take this any further.”

  “But we still don’t know what we’re looking for exactly,” Esme said. “It’s kind of like blundering around in the dark.”

  “True,” Deeds said. “But our mysterious killer seems to know what he’s looking for. So if we follow his lead, we may just blunder onto the answer.”

  I couldn’t think of a better strategy.

  SEVENTEEN

  Nick DeLage agreed to see us at ten-thirty. His office was on Florida, a four-lane boulevard that leads east from the river all the way to the next parish. DeLage Insurance was in a one-story complex that included a firm of consulting engineers, a hypnotherapist, and a couple of dentists. A peroxide blond secretary in her late thirties sat in the midst of a computer array I envied—big-screen monitor, flatbed scanner, and printer, which was busy spewing out brightly colored pages. The secretary took my card and buzzed her boss, but he must have been waiting because he came right out.

  “So where do we stand?” he asked pleasantly, after we all took our seats in his office. One wall was covered with certificates, intermingled with pictures of DeLage shaking hands with mostly forgotten politicians. A plaque in the center said he’d sold a million dollars’ worth of insurance in 1995. Just under it, in a gold frame, was a fancy computer mockup of a thousand-dollar bill with DeLage’s picture in the center, and the legend, OUR FIRST THOUSAND DOLLARS.

  Nick DeLage smiled, but his eyes ate us alive.

  I took a deep breath and told him where we stood.

  When I was finished he whistled.

  “Lewis, huh? Isn’t he the man Louisiana’s named for?”

  “It was named for the king of France,” Pepper said.

  “Well, I never was any good at history.” He picked up a paperweight that said U.S. SENATE and pretended to examine it.

  “Does this make Désirée worth more?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t know how you compute historical value.”

  “It’s easy,” he said. “Land that’s laying there unused sells for whatever you can get from somebody. Land you can develop into a tourist attraction goes for a hell of a lot more.”

  “That’s what you see this as?” I asked. “A tourist attraction?”

  DeLage shrugged. “Why not? You told me this place in Tennessee where Lewis is supposed to be buried is a national park. You don’t think the government got that land for nothing. Why not have a national park down here?” He leaned toward us. “Hey, there’d be plenty of archaeology work for you folks. We’d all do real good.”

  A vision of souvenir stands and hamburger stalls sprang into my mind.

  “Only,” DeLage went on, “I wouldn’t want some halfassed little out-of-the-way park, like these state commemorative areas. I could get the tourist commission involved, maybe get some help from the gambling boats.” His eyes were alight with enthusiasm. “Look, we could dress people up in the costumes they used to wear, see? Throw big parties. You say this Lewis was shot: We could stage that again, only right here.”

  “We aren’t sure the man really is buried there at this point,” I told him. “We need to do more study.”

  DeLage shrugged. “So do it.” He squinted. “Or do you need some money? I might be able to get some backers.”

  “I think we can handle it at this point,” I said. “But we’ll need to look a little more closely at your aunt’s journals.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if we make a claim like this people will say it’s all a forgery unless we have the original documents analyzed.”

  “Yeah, well, I know how that works. You get your expert, they get theirs, just like in court. The key’s getting the right man.” He looked at Pepper and grinned. “Or woman.”

  “We know somebody who can do it,” I said.
“He used to work for the FBI.”

  “Yeah?” He shook his head. “Never had much use for those guys. Traffic cops with law degrees. What else we got?”

  “That’s about it,” I said. “But we’d like to borrow the journals.”

  The close-set eyes pinioned me.

  “Soon as we have an agreement in writing,” he said. “I’ll have my lawyers draw one up.”

  I took a deep breath. It was what I’d been afraid of.

  “You don’t mind if we see your aunt,” Pepper said then.

  DeLage shrugged. “Why not? So long as she’s feeling up to it.”

  I got up and he followed suit.

  “Sounds like we may have something here, right?” he asked, trying to sound casual. “Hell, this could be a big deal. And I don’t reckon it would hurt your reputation to find out where this guy is really buried. Maybe you could write a book. Then you wouldn’t even have to do this kind of work anymore. That’d be okay, wouldn’t it?”

  “Depends,” I said noncommittally.

  He walked us to the door and stopped to put a hand on the blond secretary’s shoulder. “By the way, heard anything more about who killed old Flowers?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me, either. Well, maybe it was a burglar, huh?”

  “All things are possible,” I said and hurried out of the office.

  We were out of the parking lot before Pepper spoke.

  “Disneyland on the River, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I think we ought to go see Miss Ouida right now and try to get the journals,” she said. “I don’t trust that bastard.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  It was eleven-thirty when we parked in the nursing home lot. We went to the reception desk and asked for Ouida Fabré, but the receptionist shook her head.

  “Miss Ouida’s having a bad day. It would be best to come another time.”

  “When would you suggest?” I asked.

  “Some other time,” the woman repeated.

  There wasn’t anything else to do but leave.

  I picked the Blazer up at noon and Pepper followed me to a Lebanese restaurant about two miles south of the campus. We took a table in the corner, away from the other diners, and my skin tingled at the quiet intimacy of the setting.

  Last night, after we’d finished at Esme’s, she’d dropped me off for a couple of hours’ sleep and gone home to her own place. When she’d swung by this morning to pick me up I was cursing myself for not having made my move.

  “Pepper, about last night …”

  “Shhhh.” She reached over the table and squeezed my hand. “Let’s order. Do you like taboulleh?”

  “Love it,” I said.

  The waiter came.

  “And a glass of wine?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “There’s not much more we can do at this point,” I said as we ate. “I mean, we can’t see Miss Ouida, and Esme’s taking care of getting permission to look at the will. Shelby Deeds is on his way to Tennessee and I guess we’re temporarily out of work.”

  “So what do you suggest?” she asked softly.

  “We could drop by my place,” I suggested and then felt deflated when she shook her head negatively.

  “No.” She took a sip from the wineglass. “My apartment is closer.”

  My heartbeat started to quicken again.

  “Finish eating,” I said.

  It was a short drive from the restaurant to the Highland Road subdivision where she lived. She turned into the driveway ahead of me and I parked just behind her Integra. Like a guilty teenager, I looked around to see if anyone was watching from the house, but it appeared deserted.

  Love in the Afternoon, I thought, remembering the old movie. Except that I wasn’t Gary Cooper, she wasn’t Audrey Hepburn, and there sure weren’t any gypsies to play music. But who the hell needed them?

  I floated up the steps after her, feeling eighteen again and as light on my feet as a dancer. I figured this must be a dream, but if it was I didn’t want to wake up.

  But I did wake up, and sooner than I expected.

  It happened when she stopped in front of her door and gave a little cry.

  “Alan, somebody’s been here.”

  I reached the top of the landing and saw the door cracked open.

  “Let me go in first,” I said, gently pushing her to the side.

  “Don’t go in,” she warned. “He might still be inside.”

  I pushed the door open slowly and looked in.

  The room was a shambles, with books pulled onto the floor and stuffing from the sofa scattered in great heaps over the rug.

  I turned around and put my arms around Pepper. There wasn’t a lot to say.

  The police came in twenty minutes, a patrolman in a marked car who looked inside, asked if anything was missing (how could you tell?), and wrote some notes. Probably kids, he said: There’d been other break-ins in the neighborhood. When I told him there was more to it and explained about Flowers, he squinted at me, said he’d pass it on to the detectives, and asked Pepper not to come back until the crime scene people had checked the premises. He handed her his card with the case number and asked where she’d be. I gave him my own card and told him to call us if they needed a statement. Then we drove to my office.

  “It has to have happened this morning,” she said, settling into the chair next to my desk. “But our killer wouldn’t have risked it in broad daylight. A burglar, maybe, but not our killer.”

  I nodded as Marilyn appeared in the doorway.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, her eyes going from me to Pepper and back again.

  “Fine,” I said.

  She looked at us a second longer and then went back into the outer room.

  Pepper leaned forward: “She knows something,” she whispered. “Did you see her eyes on us when we came in?”

  “Marilyn’s very protective,” I said. “And jealous as hell.”

  “You don’t mean she …”

  “For me?” I laughed. “No. She’s got a boyfriend. But she doesn’t like to share my attention with other women.”

  “That’s silly. It’s so—”

  “Female,” I quipped and saw her go red. Then she saw me smiling and exhaled sharply.

  “No wonder you’re single.”

  Thank God the phone rang.

  “It’s Esme,” I told her as I heard the historian’s voice.

  “Alan, I just wanted to check in and let you know I’ve got tentative approval to have our expert take the will out for examination. There are some papers that have to be signed and, as usual, it has to go through a herd of vice chancellors, but it seems pro forma, so long as our man has the right credentials.”

  “Good. Any word from Shelby?”

  “Not yet. He left early this morning, though. He said he’ll call when he gets to Columbia.”

  “Somebody ransacked Pepper’s apartment.”

  “While you were at my place last night?”

  “Or while we were running around this morning. We just found it.”

  “Was it a burglary or was it our killer?”

  “I’d bet the latter,” I said. “He was sending a message. He couldn’t get into my place because of the alarm.”

  “Which means this person isn’t a professional criminal,” Esme pointed out. “They can always get around alarms, or so I hear.”

  “Be careful, Esme. You’re the only one he hasn’t gone after so far.”

  “Pooh. He knows better than to tangle with me. By the way, did he leave any kind of message this time?”

  “Not that we saw.”

  “Hmmm. You might want to check again. This individual likes to leave calling cards.” She tisked. “Well, keep me abreast. I assume you and Pepper will be together when I need you?”

  “More or less,” I said, and, when I’d disconnected, turned on my computer.

  “What’s the story?” P
epper asked.

  “Esme wanted to know if we’d found a warning. I thought I’d check my E-mail.”

  “You don’t think he’d try the same thing over again?”

  “I doubt it. But you can’t tell. He’s been a step ahead so far.”

  I clicked the mouse several times, accessing the Internet and then calling up my E-mail.

  A message from yesterday, from an ex-crewman who’d gone west to excavate at pueblo ruins and wanted to say hello and how were things in the great swamp?

  A note from an archaeologist in Mississippi who was doing a study of Indian mounds and wanted a copy of a report we’d done a couple of years ago.

  And finally:

  YOU WON’T STOP.

  I’VE KILLED ONCE.

  DO YOU REALLY WANT ME TO KILL AGAIN?

  EIGHTEEN

  “Damn,” Pepper swore, staring down over my shoulder at the blue screen. “Sent this morning at ten-fifteen.”

  “Look at the address,” I said.

  After the sequence of letters listing the carrier were the telltale letters CRTASSOC.

  “He sent it from my computer!” Pepper cried. “He just walked right in, in the middle of the morning, wrecked the place, and then sent you an E-mail letter from my computer.”

  “Which means he has your password,” I said.

  She shrugged. “That’s no problem. I have it on a piece of paper taped to the wall over my desk.”

  “So the message may have been lagniappe,” I said. “Just something he threw in when he saw your password.”

  “Could be,” she allowed. “Bastard.”

  Her fists clenched.

  “I’ll print it out and give it to the police,” I said. “For all the good it will do.”

  I went into the outer office, got the sheet out of the printer, put it into an envelope, and called for the patrolman who’d made the initial report.

  “Well, it tells us something,” I said, “but I’m not sure what that leaves.”

  “Oh?”

  “It wasn’t DeLage: We talked to him on the phone at nine and he’d have had to have wings to get back to his office at ten-thirty when we met with him.”