Balloons Can Be Murder: The Ninth Charlie Parker Mystery

by Connie Shelton

  Patterson’s family looked equally good in their photo, obviously taken from the same dais on the same day. The candidate was also tall, also good-looking, and also accompanied by a wife and son. No daughter for this one. The son was probably about Rachael’s age because of the obvious acne and brace-smile.

  I scrolled through the weeks as the election began to draw near. The smiles became more tight and the promises began to be ignored in favor of jabs and smears at each other. One photo of a political forum caught Linda Fairfield with a wine glass not quite concealed in her hand as she posed with her husband. I wondered where the paper kept its outtakes, or whatever they called them, the photos their photographers snapped but which never made it to print. Undoubtedly, there would be some good stuff there.

  “Ma’am?” The voice startled me and I nearly fell out of my chair. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to tell you that it’s five o’clock and I’m closing up.”

  My face must have registered disappointment. I’d not gotten through a fraction of the issues I wanted to.

  “You said someone would be here late?” I asked.

  “Well, Sarah’s in her office and a couple of the reporters still have to email their stories. But . . .”

  “I really just have a few more places to check,” I said. “And I drove all this way . . .”

  “You can always come back tomorrow.”

  “But that’s just the thing. I have to be back in Albuquerque tomorrow.” I tried to make my eyebrows do that pleading thing. “Please? Just a little while longer?”

  She fell for it. “Okay, but stay in here and if anyone asks what you’re doing just say that Gerald said it was all right.”

  “Gerald.”

  “The office manager. He’s gone already but nobody will question it.”

  “Right.”

  She closed the door behind her, exposing a file cabinet that I hadn’t seen before. File cabinets are kind of my specialty and it didn’t take me more than two minutes to figure out where the photo archives were. This was way better than the public stuff any day. I silently pressed the thumb button on the door, locking myself in, and took the first folder labeled ‘1984 Election’ to my work table.

  The pictures covered the same events I’d found on the front pages but these revealed a lot more about the players. Linda Fairfield seemed to frequently get caught with drinks in her hand. Dottie Patterson, Dean’s wife, must have stubbed out dozens of cigarettes for those staged photos but the evidence right here showed the truth. Since her husband had apparently campaigned hard on the issue of making all city restaurants non-smoking, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the many shots of the two of them looking apathetically at each other. This was not an ideally matched couple.

  By the time I’d flipped all the way through the folder, I’d put together a picture of the Pattersons: he being preachy, polished, and very conscious of his image (evidenced by some blurred shots where he’d obviously reached up to smooth his perfect hair); she being a secret smoker, also conscious of her image (as evidenced by the shots where she didn’t know the camera was on her and she’d not sucked in her tummy bulge), and not a very happy woman. Here she was, on the verge of becoming the first lady of the whole town and her candid shots revealed sad eyes and forced smiles.

  The Fairfields also presented a different picture: Bill’s political zeal showed through, with a hard edge to his mouth and a fearsome stare in his eyes. Grayson showed up again as his father’s little clone, eyes watching his dad’s moves, emulating his postures. Rachael looked bored in every shot where she wasn’t required to smile. Linda looked . . . well, in several of the shots she looked more interested in Dean Patterson than in her own husband.

  Chapter 13

  Well, well. A little something going on between Linda Fairfield and her husband’s number one rival? That certainly could prove to be interesting, after all. I wondered if the feelings were mutual.

  I pulled out the few photos in which the two families mingled. Nothing overt, just hints, body language. Maybe I was imagining it. As I got to the back of the folder I realized it had a built-in pocket, the kind of file folder where you could separate the contents and put special items in the little pocket. Someone certainly had. Jammed down out of sight in the pocket was a single photo. It was a group scene in which people mingled with drinks in hand. Linda certainly had hers, obviously not her first of the evening, judging by the giddy look on her face. Dean Patterson stood at the left side of the picture, talking to a short man in a tux. More accurately, the short man was talking to Dean. Dean and Linda were exchanging a look that spoke volumes. If a picture is worth a thousand words, that steamy look was worth one: blackmail.

  My mind whirled through possibilities and couldn’t settle on anything. Voices in the hall interrupted my reverie and, without thinking, I jammed the photo into my bag along with the four or five others I’d separated out. In one swift move I closed the folder, three-stepped across the room and jammed it back into its space in the drawer, closing the drawer as quietly as I could.

  I held my breath as the voices went on by and I returned to my chair. Could we be looking at another motive for someone to want Bill Fairfield out of the way? Maybe Linda didn’t really want to be the town’s first lady and she’d sabotaged his chances. Maybe she’d had a thing going with Dean Patterson for a long time. So many things didn’t make sense.

  A glance at my watch told me that I better hustle as I returned to the microfiche. Now the election itself took on new importance, as I wondered whether the dirty little secrets of the two families ever became public and how Bill’s arrest figured into it. I scrolled quickly to the weeks nearer to the election. The campaign continued to heat up, the issues of the day being hotly debated. Then came the day of Bill’s arrest—three weeks before the election.

  MAYORAL CANDIDATE WITHDRAWS UNDER CLOUD read the first headline. The article, obviously written minutes before press time, gave no details and promised more later. By the following week, the story made the lower half of the front page, with a notice that William Fairfield, former candidate for mayor, had been arrested on suspicion of child molestation. The headline that week was about the newcomer who’d shown up to run in Bill’s spot on the ballot. The next week carried the news that Patterson had won in a landslide. Nothing about Fairfield.

  I pondered that. Was it simply a matter of the small town grapevine being quicker than the newspaper? Everyone already knew the skinny on the whole thing so why take up space? Or was it a case of the paper shoving the real dirt under the carpet, protecting one of its prominent families? Small towns were funny that way. I’d probably never know the answers.

  A tap came at the door and I opened it.

  “I saw the light on in here,” the young guy said. He sent me a puzzled look.

  “I guess I better get going,” I offered.

  “Unless you want to spend the night. We’re all heading out.”

  “One second.” I put away the reels of film and gathered my jacket and purse, with the evidence of my thievery inside. I hoped nothing showed on my face but he didn’t question me.

  Outside, it was getting quite dark. Gray clouds formed a low ceiling over the flat terrain and the smell of ozone told me to expect rain shortly. Streetlights had already come on. Rusty greeted me happily, sticking his head out the window I’d left open for him, smearing the glass with lovely doggy slobber. No such thing as a clean car for a dog owner, I guess. I shoved him out of the way so I could climb inside. Two blocks over I located a motel that looked big and clean and would allow dogs with a twenty-five dollar deposit.

  We settled into our room, which was the standard version of such rooms all over the country, this one including a hair dryer and a teenie coffee maker. I dumped some nuggets into Rusty’s bowl and pondered my next move while he wolfed them down. Ron had given me the name of the older bank teller, the one he’d been unable to reach on his visit. Since it was now well after banking hours, I took the c
hance and looked up her name in the phone book.

  The beauty of small towns is that the phone directories are also small and people don’t seem to have that big-city paranoia about having unlisted numbers. Debbie Fuller didn’t even bother to disguise the fact that she was a lone female. And she answered on the first ring. I introduced myself and gave my prepared story about how I needed to get in touch with Bill Fairfield and understood that he used to work at the bank.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Debbie said. Her eastern New Mexico accent was just one tiny y’all away from its West Texas neighbors. “Mr. Fairfield worked at the bank years ago, but, heavens, I haven’t kept up with him. After the, uh, unpleasantness of that election he left town.”

  “Did Mrs. Fairfield and the children leave at the same time?”

  The line went so quiet that I thought she’d hung up.

  “Debbie?”

  “Who did you say you were again?”

  “I’m with RJP Investigations in Albuquerque. We’re working on a case involving the daughter.”

  “Well, I didn’t know the family all that well. You could check with Miranda Clement. She retired from the bank a few years ago but she was Mr. Fairfield’s secretary.”

  “Is she still here in Clovis?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She closed down with this note of formality and I knew I wasn’t getting anything more from her. I thanked her and hung up.

  Back to the little phone directory, where a listing for Riley Clement gave me an address. I consulted the sketchy street map in the front of the directory and thought I could find the place. Fifteen minutes later I pulled up in front of a modest ranch style home with a wide lawn and neat borders of brick-edged flower beds. The storm that had dumped rain on Albuquerque yesterday had now reached the eastern edge of the state. Gusts of damp breeze rolled through the treetops, sprinkling my windshield with droplets. I left two windows cracked a couple of inches for Rusty before getting out and facing the chill.

  A stocky woman in her late sixties opened the door. She had probably been to the beauty parlor that day. Her blond hair held the just-sprayed tightness of a new set meant to last for a week. I revised my story, leaving out the part about our investigation, pretending instead to be an old school friend of Rachael’s who hadn’t seen her since fifth grade.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Miranda said, ushering me into an early American living room. She insisted on bringing iced tea and saw to it that I was comfortably settled into a cushy flowered chair. “I’ve so often wondered about Rachael myself.”

  “I heard there was a terrible scandal and her father went to jail,” I said, edging a conspiratorial whisper into my voice. “Did Rachael and her mom stay in town after that?”

  “Not for long, I’m afraid. Her mother died just a few weeks later, you know.”

  “A few weeks?” Odd. I hadn’t at all gotten that impression from Rachael herself. She’d led me to believe her mother went into rehab and there was a steady decline over a period of years.

  “. . . suicide, but a lot of us never believed that.”

  “Excuse me? I . . . I didn’t catch that.”

  “I just said that a lot of people around here never really believed that Linda Fairfield killed herself.”

  “She drank a lot, didn’t she? We kids never really talked about it, but you kind of knew.”

  “Yes. Poor Mr. Fairfield. He’d come into the bank some mornings, distracted. You knew he had problems at home but he never talked about them.”

  “And I guess his election campaign must have been rough. We heard a little about it on the news in Albuquerque. My parents loved to catch any little news item about people they knew from back home.” Careful, Charlie, you’ll start believing your own fiction.

  Miranda remained perched at the edge of the plaid sofa. She reached for her tea glass before addressing my question.

  “The election was a terrible time for all of us. I often wondered whether it was smart for Bill to get involved at that time, his wife being so fragile and all. The pace of it, the cameras and reporters all the time. They had some social function nearly every night of the week and it wasn’t doing her any good.”

  “The drinking picked up, I guess.”

  “Well, yes. And then Bill’s arrest. You heard about that, I imagine.”

  I nodded.

  “That just about split the whole town. He dropped out of the mayoral race immediately, of course, even though he didn’t do the horrible things she accused him of. I never did understand that. Never will. Bill Fairfield might not have been a saint, heaven knows. He ran a pretty tight ship at the bank and he probably angered some people along the way. And he’d do just about anything to get ahead politically. Wanted to be governor someday, you know. But to touch his little girl like that? No, not Bill. I just never will believe that.”

  “And Mrs. Fairfield died very soon afterward?”

  “That’s the other thing I started to say. I’ll never believe she killed herself. Maybe it was the drink. That’s the devil’s work, you know, that liquor. But I could almost understand in her case. She was unhappy in the political life.”

  “Maybe she really was unhappy enough to kill herself,” I said.

  “But it doesn’t make sense, does it? Bill was, truthfully, the cause of her unhappiness. He’d been arrested, her time in the political spotlight was over. I always thought she’d finally be able to take her daughter and pick up her own life, do whatever she wanted.”

  So, why would she kill herself when she was on the verge of being free of the life she didn’t want? The woman had a point.

  “Well, you came here for information about Rachael, didn’t you?” she said, popping up from her seat. “I’m pretty sure she ended up in Albuquerque. Never hear from her myself, but I do get a Christmas card every year from her brother. Let me get you his address.” She bustled out of the room.

  I let out a pent-up breath. Why, indeed, would Linda Fairfield have killed herself? She’d been in love with Dean Patterson and suddenly, with her husband out of the way, she could have had her dream. Except that Dean had a wife. And Dean was clearly going to become mayor, with dear Dottie at his side. Dottie, not Linda.

  Miranda reappeared, a sheet of small notepaper in her hand. “Here you go. This is Grayson’s address. I’m sure he’ll know where Rachael is nowadays.”

  “Thanks.” I stuck the note in my purse without really looking at it. Miranda didn’t sit again and I took this as a hint. “Whatever happened to the man who ran against Bill in the election? He won, I guess.”

  “Dean Patterson. Oh yes, he won easily. Let’s see . . .” she glanced upward. “He served just one term as mayor. I’ll never forget his wife. She was another who never wanted to be in politics. They’d send her out to give a speech somewhere and she’d manage to offend someone every time. They divorced shortly after he left office. Still lives in town, I think. We don’t exactly move in the same circles.”

  “And Dean? Is he still in town?” Who knew, I might get something useful from one of them.

  “No . . . gosh, I have no idea. I’m sure he’s not still in Clovis. I’d know for sure if he was. But I have no idea where he went. Isn’t that strange?”

  She stood in her doorway as I stepped out onto the wet sidewalk. The downpour would be only moments away, and I scurried to my Jeep. As I left the quiet residential neighborhood it hit me that I hadn’t eaten in over seven hours so I made my way back to the commercial district where I found a drive-in burger place, one of those old fashioned ones where you parked your car under an awning and talked to a little speaker.

  While I waited for my double deluxe cheeseburger, tater tots and Coke to arrive I pulled out the phone directory that I’d brought from my room and looked up Dottie. There was a D.J. Patterson listed, and the address looked to me like it would only be a couple of blocks from the Fairfield’s old place. It seemed like a reasonable assumption that she’d be the one.

  Thirty minutes later, sufficiently full
and having waited out the initial downpour of rain, I headed toward the once-posh country club section of town. I cruised past the Fairfield’s former home and agreed with Ron’s assessment—upscale, as seventies-style homes in small towns went. The block of split-level and two story homes remained very well maintained, with wide lawns and subtle landscape lighting. Three blocks down and two over I found the Patterson’s place, a two story house with dramatic arches across the front and a pitched roof done in wood shake shingles. Lights glowed at several windows, upstairs and down, and a ten-year-old Cadillac sedan sat in the driveway. I parked at the curb and wondered briefly if Dottie would even open the door to me after dark.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have much choice. I’d reached for the bell when the door opened and the quiet night air erupted with hen chatter from a set of women who were clearly on their way out. I stepped aside as three women in pastel pantsuits with darling little embroidered embellishments, purses hooked over their arms, and plastic bonnets over their bouffant hair, stepped out. Pointed stares reminded me that my normally straight hair had probably kinked in the humidity and that I could probably be taken for anything from a salesperson to a wayward hippie at this point. I sent a cryptic smile at each of them and maintained my position within arm’s length of the door.

  By the time they reached the edge of the covered porch they realized it was still sprinkling rain, so this prompted a quick dash to the Cadillac.

  “Dottie?” I said, stepping into her line of sight while her attention was still on her retreating guests.

  “Do I know you?” She firmly gripped the edge of the door with her right hand. Her once fiery red hair was now a pale apricot, styled in a neat cap of feathers, and her fair complexion still contained a few freckles. The wide-smiling mouth that had just bade her friends goodbye now turned into a straight line framed by deeply etched verticals leading toward her chin. I guessed her to be somewhere in her seventies.