Dead Body Language

by Penny Warner

  I found the ladder propped sideways against the side of the dilapidated building. In a matter of minutes I had lowered it into the pit and was climbing slowly down inside, checking first to see if anyone might be watching. The coast was clear.

  Digging around the crumbly red clay, I picked up the shiny object, dusted it off, and slipped it on my finger reflexively. A ring—large, gold and ornate. Obviously created for a man. A worm sticking out of the sides of the dirt wall reminded me where I was. I quickly climbed back up the ladder.

  Replacing the ladder where I found it, I scanned the area near the backhoe on a hunch. After several minutes of bending and swiping, I found what I was looking for hidden beneath a nearby bush.

  Sluice’s backpack. He never went anywhere without it. Except maybe the hospital.

  He’d apparently set it aside when he went to work on the backhoe. I thought he might have done as much. It wouldn’t have been easy to hold onto the bag while operating the big machinery. But I’d never known him to let it out of his sight. The backpack had been passed over last night in the dark. No one had even thought to look for it.

  I sat down on a nearby cement bench and opened one of the zippered compartments. Two Cornish pastie meat pies, still in their wrappers, slightly squished, and smelling pungent. A pencil engraved “dom,” which I took to be what was left of the name of the mortuary, knife-sharpened nearly to the nub. Four Q-Tips. A small tube of Vaseline. A set of dentures. A postcard from a country western singer, well known on the Mother Lode circuit, with the inscription: “To Sluice Jackson. Keep the fuck away from me. Stacey.” A gold locket with a picture of a young girl inside. His sweetheart? His daughter? And at the bottom a crumpled piece of paper.

  I unfolded the paper and smoothed it in my fingers. The name “Leonard Swec” was written in smeared pencil.

  I returned the items to the bag and closed the flap. Nothing of any particular interest that I could see. The name Swec rang a tiny bell—I’d have to check it out.

  I pulled the backpack’s leather strap over my shoulder, hopped on my bike, and rode on to the sheriff’s office. He’d want to see the pack and the ring, I was certain. No one was in the office except the dispatcher, who was busy taking a call. As I waited to explain my find, I watched her animated lips as she spoke into the tiny microphone attached to the headgear.

  “Yes, French. Three? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And you don’t know where they could have gone to? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Can you describe them? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. I’ll send Deputy Arnold over as soon as he gets back from another call. Try not to touch anything in the area. I understand, French. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes, French.”

  She pulled the earphone from her head and shook her bouncy dyed-brown permed curls. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Hi, Connor. Whatcha got there?”

  Rebecca Matthews was an old pro on the dispatch circuit. And when I say old, I mean seventy-four and proud of it, still feisty, alert, and reminiscently beautiful, with a pink little smile, a creamy albeit crinkled complexion, and sparking green eyes, slightly bloodshot. She smoothed her sundress as she spoke.

  I explained my find to Rebecca and asked her to keep the backpack for the sheriff until he returned. She promised she would.

  “But it’ll probably be awhile before he can take a look at it. He’s out to the hospital where Sluice Jackson was admitted and I’m sure he’ll be there a bit. I could give it to Deputy Arnold when he gets back from a domestic, but first I need to send him to the mortuary on a five-oh-one.”

  “Five-oh-one?”

  “Suspected burglary. French claims one of his client’s jewelry is gone and the family is having a nit-fit, making all kinds of accusations. They’ve threatened to sue him if he doesn’t get it back. He says nothing like this has ever happened before. Says it will ruin his business. You know how he is, so quick to panic.”

  Jewelry. “Did he say what’s missing?” I asked, my heart beginning to pound out a rap beat.

  “Some rings. Three of them. Gold.”

  “What’s the name of the family?”

  “Sweat. Or something like that.”

  I pulled the loose ring from my finger and examined the inside. In tiny script the letters L.F.S. were engraved.

  Swec. L.F.S. Leonard Swec. I thought, as I spun the ring around on my finger.

  After talking with the dispatcher, once again I postponed my visit to Arden Morris in Rio Vista. Something more interesting had come up and Arden Morris could wait.

  I parked my bike in front of Wolf’s Gold Expeditions and Jewelry at the corner of Main and Church streets and smiled at the incongruous shop, located between the Naughty Lingerie boutique and Liquid Gold Cappuccino Café.

  The jewelry shop was faced in weather-distressed wood made to look like an old mine. The logo had been hand-lettered in black paint with a large brush, reinforcing the image of a fortunate prospector who had just set up shop.

  Once inside the swinging saloon doors, I moved over to the display case, which featured sparkling gold rings, necklaces, bracelets, watches, and the like. They were nestled on a bed of soft river sand and interspersed with large faux nuggets I suspected were iron pyrite. The jewelry, however, looked real, and had prices to match. Wolf did excellent work and his ornate pieces were unique.

  When I first visited the store to have my ex-boy friend’s gold bracelet melted down and returned to a nugget, Wolf had been accommodating but not overly friendly. Perhaps the gruff demeanor was part of the gold country show.

  Wolf was attractive in a grungy sort of way, a kind of aging hippie, probably in his forties or fifties—it was tough to tell from the outdoorsy exterior. He wore his long, unkempt hair in a ponytail tied with a leather strap. His body, tall, thin, but muscular, was usually displayed under motorcycle-emblazoned tank tops and cutoff jeans. He probably kept a few women’s eyes averted from the jewelry case for longer than necessary. His knit brows seemed never to relax over his dark eyes, and he hid his mottled, uneven teeth beneath a bushy mustache and a closed mouth.

  Wolf was waiting on a customer at the back of the store where he promoted and sold gold-panning tours. A family of five, in Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, and straw cowboy hats, was signing up for the Gold Star Excursion, which would take them to three mines and guarantee them a few grains of ore from the streams. All that starting at $19.95 per person.

  The family seemed eager to start buying the equipment that was de rigueur for the trip: picks, pans, vials to hold all that sifted loot, compasses, knives, the works. Their investment would be nearly two hundred dollars; the gold-dust payoff would be more like fifty cents.

  I looked over the jewelry case while I waited for the transaction to be completed and wondered about the quiet, unobtrusive Wolf Quick. What had he been doing at the cemetery so late last night? How did he happen upon Sluice Jackson?

  A murder mystery in the rough-and-ready gold country would be great for business, especially Wolf’s business, I thought. Tourists would flock to the town out of morbid curiosity and vicarious thrills, and while visiting, might opt for a tour of the depleted gold mines and dry creeks. They might even buy a few pieces of expensive gold jewelry while they were at it.

  I scanned the glittery rings beneath the clear glass. Some with jewels, some randomly shaped, some smooth and shiny, some rugged and nuggetlike. Each was detailed and costly. A small hand-lettered sign read: No Two Alike.

  I looked up from my sparkling daydream and noticed the tourists had vanished. Wolf sat perched on a stool in the back corner, talking on a cellular phone while polishing a bracelet. I watched his lips move but couldn’t make out any of the words, his mouth obscured by the receiver and his thick mustache. I waited for him to hang up, then I moved over casually.

  “Hi, Wolf. Business seems good today, huh?”

  He glanced up to acknowledge me and went back to his work.

  “I was looking for a ring for my uncle … Remus. The ones in the cabinet are nice, but do you have anything el
se that’s more, I don’t know, something different?”

  Wolf finished polishing the bracelet and slipped it into his pocket. With a side nod of his head, he indicated I was to follow him into the back room.

  We passed behind a tie-dyed curtain and entered Wolf’s workroom. The small, cramped space was taken up by three massive, distressed-wood tables, each covered with a jumble of tools, molds, pots of melted wax, knives, chunks of gold, and other jewelry-making supplies I couldn’t identify. A couple of bracelets and a necklace rested in molds, waiting to be set free. Underneath one of the wooden benches, Wolf pulled open a drawer to reveal a scatter of rings of varying shapes and sizes.

  “Wow! You have so many,” I said, fingering the collection. There must have been several thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry in the drawer. “Don’t you worry about theft?”

  He looked at me, then called out what looked like, “Bitch!” snapping his finger. Unseen until that moment, a Great Dane emerged from under the table. The dog stretched, stood erect, and either smiled or snarled, depending on your attitude. I chose to call it a smile.

  I smiled back. “Down, killer—uh,” I said. “Nice doggy. Sit. Roll over. Play dead.” The dog continued to smile/snarl. “You call her Bitch?”

  Wolf said “Butch,” then something I didn’t catch, mainly because I was looking at his dog. The hound relaxed, circled me and sniffed Casper on me before returning to his spot under the bench. Then Wolf nodded toward a security system panel on a far wall. I got the picture. Fort Knox.

  I nodded. “Butch! Good. Yes. Well.” I went back to rifling through the rings until I found one that looked oddly familiar. “This one …” I held it up.

  Wolf shook his head. “Not for sale. Sorry.” He took it from my hand and slipped it into his pocket. That pocket was filling up.

  I had seen that ring before. I made mental pictures of people’s hands—Celeste, French, Sluice, Jilda, Dan …

  Lacy. She was wearing it—or one like it—when she’d come to my office. And again at her funeral. In fact, hadn’t she been buried with it? Odd—had Wolf made a copy of it? I supposed with all the jewelry-making equipment in the shop, Wolf could duplicate just about any gold jewelry pieces he fancied.

  I sifted through a few more, said I didn’t see anything just right, then thanked Wolf and told him I’d be back with my uncle so he could choose something for himself. Wolf nodded, but didn’t follow me out of the back room and into the main part of the store. As I left the double swinging doors, a young couple was headed inside.

  I swung by the Nugget Café to think, and sipped a toxic coffee and ate a blueberry bagel with strawberry cream cheese. As I glanced around the restaurant, it seemed as if everyone sported fancy gold rings. Were all of them from Wolf’s store?

  They all looked real. But you could tell the real thing from the imitations easily, if you took a moment to examine them. The weight and feel of real gold is something you cannot duplicate. You’d have to be dead not to know you weren’t really wearing the authentic ore.

  You’d have to be dead.

  Like Lacy. I thought about Lacy’s fingers and the scraped knuckle covered with makeup. I thought about Sluice’s gold ring with the initials, “L.F.S.” Had Wolf “borrowed” her ring, made a copy, and then replaced it? I thought another moment. Maybe he didn’t replace it with the original. Maybe he made a copy in faux gold and replaced that on Lacy’s dead finger. Who would know the difference?

  If he’d done this to Lacy, had he done it with others? Was Wolf somehow removing the deceaseds’ jewelry, copying it, then replacing the real thing with gold-plated phonies? If that were true, he could sell the real gold to the tourists at a tremendous profit with no one the wiser—except the inside person helping with the exchange.

  Sluice Jackson?

  Sluice could have done the switching. He had full access to the mortuary and cemetery grounds. He was there at all hours. And he had that gold ring with him when he fell into the open grave. French had reported the loss of someone’s rings this morning.

  But if any of this was true, and not just my imagination, what did it have to do with Lacy Penzance?

  Nothing that I could figure. I was getting off track. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be some connection.

  “God, Connor, so much coffee isn’t good for you, you know. You should switch to, like, herbal tea or something,” Jilda said, as she cleared away the boneyard of bagel remnants I hadn’t managed to squeeze in.

  I didn’t think so much mascara was good for her either, or so much nail glue or hair color, but what did I know? I wasn’t the Surgeon General and if Jilda Renfrew wanted to risk her health, it was her business. Coffee was mine. Sure, it tasted like poison, but I didn’t figure it would actually kill me. For awhile.

  I reached out and took Jilda’s hand to get a close-up of her nails. They were painted in hot pink with silver moons and featured a tiny diamond at each tip, trimmed with two thin diagonal gold strips. She also wore two gold rings, free-form in shape, on both her middle fingers.

  “Killer nails, Jilda. Did you do that?”

  “Yeah. You should come by the shop some afternoon when I’m there, Con. I’d do you up so cool.”

  “You do a lot of nails around here, don’t you.”

  “Oh, my God, yeah. Everyone in town practically. Women, that is. The guys haven’t gotten into it yet, but you never know. Some people thought the cowboys would never wear earrings either and look at them all.”

  I tried to picture Dan Smith with red nail tips, enhanced with gold and diamonds. I preferred his nails the way they were: short, ragged, and bitten to the quick.

  “Jilda, did you ever do Lacy’s nails?”

  Jilda shook her head, turned her back to me for a moment, then turned back. I caught the end of it.

  “… but she was a regular customer over at Nail It To You.”

  “How come she didn’t go to you? People say you’re the best.” Vanity never questions veracity.

  She blushed a little and shrugged a shoulder. “We didn’t get along that well, you know? When her husband died, she like started flirting with all the men in town. Even my Frenchy. A friend of mine caught them out to dinner one night over in Whiskey Slide, and I was totally pissed. But he said they used to go together, you know, back in high school, and it was for old times. He said she was real lonely and he was just trying to help her and all. But I know she was totally on the make.”

  “So he didn’t see her after that? As far as you know?” I prodded.

  Jilda sat down across from me and looked me in the eye. I could see dots of makeup shadowing beneath her eyes from excessive mascara coupled with repeated blinking.

  She leaned in when she spoke. “Look, she was kinda desperate after Reuben died. It’s understandable. But she had some therapy with Celeste. You know she got her face done, her boobs lifted, her tummy tucked, and then had a liposuction, a few months after Reuben died. No one was supposed to know, but she didn’t fool me. I’m training to be an esthetician, after all.”

  “Esthe-what?”

  “A beauty expert.”

  “So Lacy had cosmetic surgery?”

  Jilda bit her lip and nodded. “It was like she was a new woman. She started going out with a bunch of guys. Actually, only the ones who had some sort of status in the town, like lawyers, doctors, even the sheriff, and of course she tried Frenchy, but not for long.”

  The sheriff. He’d never mentioned it. “What about Wolf?” I asked, sipping on the coffee and blinking back the tears in my eyes from the taste.

  “No way! They didn’t get along at all.”

  “But he made a ring for her, didn’t he?”

  Jilda cleaned out her nails. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, she thought he was a loser. She used to walk out of a room when he entered and make rude comments under her breath about him. I don’t know what her problem was, not that Wolf is the easiest person to get along with. Then again,
neither was she when you really got to know her. She didn’t like me that much, either.”

  “So you don’t think anything really happened between French and Lacy those times they got together?” I remembered what French had said about going out more than once.

  Jilda blinked. Uh-oh. Had I gone too far? Maybe she only knew about one meeting. Jilda looked away, didn’t speak for a few moments, then worked on her nails again, a little more urgently.

  “I remember French was kind of weird for a couple of weeks there, when she was coming onto him. But he snapped out of it. I saw to that.”

  “Jilda, do you have any idea who Lacy might have been dating right before she died? Apparently she was involved with someone, but nobody seems to know who.” I figured if anyone would know, it would be the town waitress/manicurist.

  Jilda put a nail in her mouth for a moment. “No. Could have been anyone. Just as long as it wasn’t French, that’s all I care. French would never cheat on me, I know that now. Celeste even says so.”

  “Celeste? How would she know?”

  Jilda giggled into her hand. “You know, I thought she might have been a lesbian or something for a while there. She never dates or anything. Never seemed to be interested in men. But I figure she’s just real dedicated to her job. She’s real good at helping people overcome their sadness and stuff when a relative dies. She really helped Mrs. Penzance. I hope she’s there for me someday.”

  “How do you know she doesn’t date anyone?”

  “It’s a small town. French told me he asked her out when she first came to the mortuary—before we got involved. But Celeste wasn’t interested, thank God. French is no slacker, you know. She’s pretty and all, for her age, you know. She told me once that French was a good catch. But I guess they just didn’t hit it off that way.”