It wasn’t going to be easy to tell Ruby that her precious grandson might be a murderer.
As I left the garage I glanced again at Ragan’s car. This time my eye caught a flash of something sticking out from under the passenger’s seat.
Quickly I opened the door and peered under the seat. It was a newspaper page, folded in precise quarters. It was the classified ad page from Thursday’s newspaper. Thursday. The day Merritt Ragan had been killed. Four ads were circled in red ink. They were all for garage sales or estate sales. I dug in my purse, got out paper and pen, and copied down the addresses. Then I put the paper back where I’d found it.
I found a pay phone down the street from Ragan’s house. Edna answered on the first ring. “House Mouse.” She sounded bored.
“Mom? Call Atlanta Regional Hospital and ask about a patient named Stephen Ragan. Find out if there’s any way he could have gotten out of there Thursday. Call me back at this number.”
I’d pulled the van up close to the phone booth, so I got back in and studied the addresses I’d copied from Merritt Ragan’s newspaper while I waited. The inside of the van was hot and stuffy. I got out and walked briskly several times up and down the block, keeping within earshot of the phone. The exercise was part of my new program.
After thirty minutes of pacing, my blouse was sweat-soaked and plastered to my back. A kid sat on the porch of a weather-beaten wooden house across the street. He was staring at me. I stared back. He pulled out a giant Snickers bar, tore off the wrapper, and began licking it, slowly and deliberately, like a cat with a dead mouse. He had chocolate smeared all over his face and hands. It was in his hair, between his toes probably. I could hear my own breathing go shallow. Feel the salivary juices trickling through my chocolate-deprived digestive tract. I wanted to vault across the street, snatch the Snickers from the kid, and inhale it all in one gooey chocolate-caramel-peanut-covered nanosecond. It took every ounce of moral fiber I possessed to go back to the phone booth and call the house again.
This time it was Ruby who answered the phone. “Edna had to, uh, go to the, uh, store,” she stammered.
“Where is she really, Ruby?” I demanded. She was too saintly to be an effective liar. “Tell me.”
“Lord have mercy, I don’t know where she went,” Ruby wailed. “I was sitting here when you called the last time. She got off the phone, looked up an address in the phone book, and took off out of here like a scalded dog.”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll deal with her later.”
“Callahan, wait,” she said. “Did you talk to Darius?”
“I talked to him, but he wouldn’t talk to me.”
Silence.
“There’s goodness in that boy. But don’t nobody but me seem to know it. Can you do anything?”
I looked down at the scrap of paper with the estate sale addresses. “Maybe. What did Merritt Ragan look like? I only ever talked to him on the phone.”
“Skinny little old fella. Reminded me of one of them bantam roosters. Had a full head of white hair. Little round bifocal glasses and one of them pointy little chin beards. What was the name of that man in the children’s book? The man that made the princess spin gold all night till she guessed his name? He reminded me of him. Can’t think of the name myself.”
“Rumpelstiltskin?”
“That’s the one,” she said. “Mr. Ragan looked just that way.”
My scrap of paper was looking like Darius Greene’s last hope. “Go see him, Ruby,” I urged. “Maybe he’ll talk to you. Ask him where that money came from. And get him to tell the truth. It’s the only thing that might save him.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said wearily.
At the first house I had to elbow my way past a throng of people picking through stacks of old National Geographic magazines to get into the house. Right inside the front door I tripped over a metal and plastic contraption and nearly impaled myself on a set of brass fire-place tongs.
“That’s why I’m selling the darned thing,” said the woman who helped me to my feet. “The commercials make it look great; ski your way to a thinner you. They don’t tell you it takes up a whole room in your house and you feel like throwing up after five minutes on it.”
She’d said the magic word: thinner. I looked at the contraption with renewed interest. “Oh. A Nordic Ski-Track. How much? Does it work?”
“Twenty-five bucks,” she said quickly. “I’ll get my son to load it in the car for you.”
I looked closer at the woman. She was two inches shorter and thirty pounds heavier than me. “I’ll pass,” I said. I described Merritt Ragan and asked her if she’d seen him.
“Oh, him,” she said. “Cheapskate. He was here, talked me out of my grandmother’s cake plate for two bucks.”
An older woman wearing a large cotton duster over her dress was packing up boxes at the second address. “Oh yeah, I know Merritt,” she said. “He comes to our sales all the time.”
“I do this professionally,” she said, before I could ask. “Run estate sales, that is. Merritt came by about ten Thursday. We had lots of books and coins and record albums. Nothing he buys. We chatted and he left.”
She didn’t seem curious about why I was asking, and I hated to tell her anyway.
The third house was in an older neighborhood of brick bungalows. An older man, maybe in his late sixties, said he’d been too busy to notice who’d been at his sale Thursday. He agreed to look through his cash box, but there was no check from Merritt Ragan.
Depressed, I nearly skipped the fourth house entirely after pulling up to the curb. Two young mothers had piled a load of playpens, baby strollers, toys, and other kid paraphernalia in the driveway. It was the exercise bike that caught my eye.
I got out of the van and circled it warily. Kicked the tire. Checked the odometer. It had twelve miles on it. One of the women noticed my interest.
“My husband gave me that last year for an anniversary gift,” she said. “I kicked the bum out a week later. Let you have the bike for $30, and I’ll throw in the Thigh Master for nothing.”
“Don’t think so,” I said. It turned out that she hadn’t seen anybody who looked like Rumpelstiltskin the day before.
A convenience store a couple blocks away looked like a good place to get a cold drink and use the phone. I left the drink cooler door open while I decided between Slim Fast and Ultra Slim Fast. I went with the Ultra. Then I called home again.
“House Mouse.” My prodigal mother had returned.
“Where the hell were you?”
“You’re dieting again, aren’t you?” she snapped. “God help us all. If you must know, those old prunes over at the hospital wouldn’t tell me diddly over the phone, so I went for a visit.”
“You didn’t,” I said, knowing she had.
“Stephen Ragan hasn’t been anywhere since Wednesday,” she said. “He burned his hands in a craft class. Second-degree burns. He’s in the infirmary and he’s heavily sedated. I saw him with my own eyes.”
I sighed. “Good work. I don’t want to know how you got that information.”
“I told ’em I was Sergeant Edna Bentley of the Atlanta PD,” she said proudly.
When I pointed out that she’d committed a felony, impersonating a police officer, she made a rude noise. “Don’t be late for supper,” she said nastily. “It’s fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits, and peach cobbler. Don’t worry, though; since you’re counting calories, I’ll make unsweetened iced tea.”
I hung up the phone and groaned.
That’s when I noticed the cardboard sign tacked to a utility pole across the street. “Estate Sale. Thurs. Fri.,” it said. There was an address and an arrow pointing down the nearest cross street.
The house was a two-story white frame affair. The lot was weedy, and the paint was peeling. I knocked at the screen door. When there was no answer, I poked my head in and hollered, “Anybody home?”
The woman who came bustling up the hall was in her e
arly fifties probably. She was short, maybe 5’2”, with gray hair cut in a Dutch boy, and her china blue eyes regarded me warily.
“Most everything’s already sold,” she said, wiping her hands on the rickrack-trimmed apron tied around her thick middle. “Just a few things left. Come in if you want. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She hurried away down the hall. The house smelled of mothballs. She was right, there wasn’t much left at all. The living room floors were stripped bare, and my footsteps echoed loudly in the high-ceilinged room. All that was left here was a lumpy brown armchair that faced an old rounded-edge television with aluminum-foil-wrapped antennas.
A large mahogany china cabinet looked forlorn in the dining room. There were light rectangles on the painted walls, where pictures had once hung. I peered inside the cabinet. There were some chipped crystal goblets and two solitary rose-patterned dinner plates. And a cracked cream pitcher with a familiar-looking design of bluebirds and butterflies. I picked it up. The handle had been broken and clumsily glued back together.
I wandered down the hallway toward the back of the house. The kitchen was an old-fashioned room, with worn green and white checkerboard linoleum, scarred wooden cabinets, and an immense old stove.
The room was thick with heat and a good, sugary smell. The woman was humming as she poured something chocolate into a square metal pan. She reached into a small white bowl and scattered nuts across the top, then moved to an ancient white Norge. She pulled the door open, put the pan inside, and pulled out another pan, setting it on a white-painted kitchen table.
“If you see anything you can’t live without, make the check out to Barbara Jane Booker,” she said. “That’s me.”
My stomach growled loudly. Embarrassed, I patted my tummy. “I’m dieting,” I said apologetically.
“What a shame,” she said. “I was going to offer you a piece of fudge. It’s a new recipe I’m testing.”
I held out the pitcher then. “Pretty, isn’t it? And unusual too. It matches a sugar bowl I found at a dead man’s house earlier today. It’s cracked, see? I guess that’s why he didn’t buy it.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. But she’d wrapped her hands in the apron and was nervously rolling and unrolling it.
“The man I’m referring to was murdered,” I said, keeping my tone conversational. “Bludgeoned to death with an iron. The police think a seventeen-year-old kid did it.”
While I was talking I was strolling around the kitchen. I stopped in front of the stove. It was still hot. She’d left the burner on. When I reached to turn it off, my hand brushed a small white card written on in purple ink. The card fluttered to the floor. I bent down to pick it up, and the last thing I remember was the sensation of cold metal meeting the side of my skull.
When I came to, I had a splitting headache. Something warm was oozing down the side of my face. I reached up gingerly to see how much blood there was. My fingers came back coated with chocolate and pecans.
“The fudge needed to set longer,” Barbara Jane Booker said apologetically. “I guess I was too impatient to test it.” She was kneeling over me with a roll of silver duct tape, which she was busily wrapping around my ankles. “When I get back from our little trip, I’ll make a note to let it sit for at least four hours.”
“Trip?” I said, wincing. My head hurt like hell.
“I can’t leave you here,” she said. “The house has been sold. We close tomorrow. Maybe six hours would be better. I hate runny fudge, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I thought, what about that big aluminum recycling bin over behind the high school? I’ve got bags and bags of cans in the trunk of my car that I was going to drop off anyway. I’m a firm believer in recycling. Aren’t you? I’ll just pop over there in your car, put you in, then dump the cans on top. To cover you up, you see. Monday is pickup day. I’m afraid I’ll have to vandalize your car. To make it look like it was stolen by some of these teenage hoodlums who terrorize decent folks like me.”
She was chattering away a mile a minute, wrapping that tape around and around my ankles.
“Mrs. Booker?”
She looked up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”
“Callahan. Callahan Garrity. I was just wondering how you were planning to dump me in one of those bins. I’m lots bigger than you, you know.”
She smiled and flashed a dimple, then reached in the pocket of her apron and brought out a big rusty black revolver. “I thought this would persuade you to climb into the bin by yourself. I’ve got a touch of lumbago in my lower back. The doctor says absolutely no heavy lifting.”
The gun was so big, she had to use both hands to hold it up. I folded my knees up against my chest, swiveled, and kicked her square in the chest, as hard as I could.
She fell backward, ass over teakettle, and the gun went clattering across that checkerboard floor. I scooted across the linoleum on my own butt, propelling myself forward with my bound ankles.
When I had the revolver, I trained it on her and managed, with difficulty, to stand up. Mrs. Booker, on the other hand, was howling with pain, screaming about her lumbago.
I cut myself free of the tape with a kitchen knife and held the gun on her with one hand while I dialed homicide with the other. While we waited for the cops to arrive, she told me what had happened. I fixed us both a glass of iced tea. Assault and battery is thirsty work.
“He got here around noon. I’d gone to get us some lunch. My husband sold him that box of recipes. You can imagine how I felt when I got back. Aunt Velma’s recipes. Gone. I liked to have died. Aunt Velma’s fudge recipe was in there. That was mine. Aunt Velma promised. My sisters and I are splitting the money from the house and the rest of the junk in here, but the fudge recipe was mine. Jerry, my husband, couldn’t remember who’d bought what. Just like a man. But he did remember he’d taken mostly checks. I took the checks and drove to every address.”
“And you ended up at a gray house off Hooper,” I suggested.
“Nasty old bastard,” she spat out. “He laughed when I asked for the recipe back. Said the box was full of money. No way would he give it back.”
“Money?”
“Aunt Velma,” she said, shaking her head fondly. “We found near $1,500 just in the kitchen. All tens and twenties. She grew up in the Depression, you know, and she never trusted banks. We found bills tucked under the shelf paper, in the pages of books, sewn into the hem of coats.”
“And in the recipe box.”
“I told him he could have the money,” she said. “He laughed at me. So I pushed right past him. He was a runty little old thing. Came nipping and yapping at my heels, like one of those little lap dogs.
“‘Get out or I’ll call the police,’ he was yelling. I just kept looking. Then I saw the box on the stove, with all the money in a pile around it. I offered him $20 for the fudge recipe card, but he wouldn’t take it. ‘This was the deal of the year,’ he said. ‘It’s mine now. Get out.’
“When he tried to grab the box away, he hurt me. Broke one of my nails.” She held up a plump pink digit to show me. The nail was ripped jaggedly. “I was so mad, I grabbed the nearest thing to hand. One of those old-timey sad irons.”
She paused then and took a long sip of tea. “I grabbed that iron and hit him on the head as hard as I could. He dropped like a rock. I took the fudge recipe and left. I didn’t care about any of the others. Aunt Velma wasn’t really all that good of a cook. Except for fudge. I was going to take the money, but on the way out, I dropped it by the front door. It didn’t seem right to take it with him dead and all.”
Barbara Jane put down the tea glass then and leaned forward to tell me something in confidence, I thought. Instead, she reached out, ran a finger across my fudge-encrusted cheek, and licked it delicately.
“Mayonnaise,” she said softly. “That was Aunt Velma’s secret ingredient. Good old Blue Plate mayonnaise. I’d never have guessed in a million years.”
KATHY HOGAN TROCHECK is a new arrival to North Carolina, but her southern mystery credentials are impeccable. A former reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she began her career in Savannah, where she covered the real-life murder trials that were the basis for Murder in the Garden of Good and Evil. Her Callahan Garrity mysteries have been nominated for Agathas, Edgars, and Anthonys. She also writes under the name of Mary Kay Andrews.
Copyright 1995 by Kathy Hogan Trocheck. First printed in Malice Domestic, volume 4 (New York: Pocket Books, 1995). Reprinted with permission of the author.
Susu and The 8:30 Ghost
Lilian Jackson Braun
When my sister and I returned from vacation and learned that our eccentric neighbor in the wheelchair had been removed to a mental hospital, we were sorry but hardly surprised. He was a strange man, not easy to like, and no one in our apartment building seemed concerned about his departure—except our Siamese cat.
The friendship between SuSu and Mr. Van was so close it was alarming.
If it had not been for SuSu we would never have made the man’s acquaintance, for we were not too friendly with our neighbors. The building was very large and full of odd characters who, we thought, were best ignored. On the other hand, our old apartment had advantages: large rooms, moderate rent, and a thrilling view of the river. There was also a small waterfront park at the foot of the street, and it was there that we first noticed Mr. Van.
One Sunday afternoon my sister Gertrude and I were walking SuSu in the park, which was barely more than a strip of grass alongside an old wharf. Barges and tugs sometimes docked there, and SuSu—wary of these monsters—preferred to stay away from the water’s edge. It was one of the last nice days in November. Soon the river would freeze over, icy winds would blow, and the park would be deserted for the winter.
SuSu loved to chew grass, and she was chewing industriously when something diverted her attention and drew her toward the river. Tugging at her leash, she insisted on moving across the grass to the boardwalk, where a middle-aged man sat in a most unusual wheelchair.
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