3 Murder In The Library

by Steve Demaree

  I awoke Wednesday morning and immediately knew that I wasn’t paralyzed. The pains I gained from walking and standing on my feet were still with me. As I lay there, I decided to gamble. If I could make it out of bed, I’d lie in a tub of warm water for a while, and see if that helped any of my aches and pains. Maybe a bookcase wasn’t all that I needed. Maybe I needed a hot tub, too. But the more I thought of it, the more I grew afraid that I’d come home some day and find my next-door neighbor in my hot tub, and that she was alive. I’d have to burn the hot tub in order to remove all the poisons from it. Maybe I could burn my next-door neighbor before I bought a hot tub. As I thought of that, I smiled, which caused the pains in my legs increased. I think God was telling me I was breaking at least one of the Ten Commandments.

  A day or so later, I emerged from the bathtub a man-sized prune. I used six towels to dry my body, then got dressed, asked God for forgiveness one more time, and set my day in motion.

  Sam had gotten off the hook long enough. It was time to see if he’d circumvented the globe and captured all of our suspects.

  “Well, Sam, do you have everyone ready for the lineup?”

  “Oh, who’s playing?”

  “I don’t mean some ballgame. I mean have you rounded up the usual suspects.”

  “Cy, do you know how many people there are in the world?”

  “I don’t want everybody. Right now I’d settle for Daniel Terloff, Carl Bauerman, and Tom Johnson.”

  “Well, Cy, it looks like I managed to round up all but three of them.”

  “You haven’t found any of them?”

  “Well, in a manner of speaking, I found one of them, but we aren’t exactly hanging out together.”

  “What you’re saying is you found someone who’s seen one of them?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Well, I’ve haven’t got all day, Sam. Which one?”

  “Terloff. I talked to some of the guys he hung out with when he was here at college, and a couple of them said he’d been back in town recently, although neither guy could give me the date they saw Terloff. Oh, and he doesn’t have long hair and a beard. At least he didn’t when he was here.”

  “And you have no idea if he was seen before or after the murder?”

  “I tried to pin them down, but neither could be sure. At least it was around that time.”

  “If it was after, he still could’ve been our long-haired murderer who trimmed his locks after the murder to avoid suspicion.”

  “If so, it didn’t work, Cy. You still suspect him.”

  “I suspect everyone.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it, Cy. I’ve a corned beef on rye who’ll testify as to my whereabouts.”

  “You mean you still have it.”

  “No, but I’ve pictures of us together.”

  “Go take your medication, Sam.”

  “Wait, Cy. I almost forgot. I do have something for you.”

  “Well, at least you’re doing a little bit of work. What do you have?”

  “I located that guy that Downey, the next-door neighbor, said he drove for. The reason I couldn’t find him sooner is that he retired last year and he and his wife have started spending their winters in Arizona, and just got back. Anyway, he said that Downey made several trips for him over the last few years and was one of the best haulers he ever had. Said he was wondering if Downey managed to stay retired, or took to the road again. He was glad to know that Downey seemed to be enjoying retirement.”

  +++

  I was about to step out my back door when a woman lunged for me. I narrowly escaped, and dashed for the front door. How could she be that fast? She was at the front door, too. I was about to slam the door, and call for backup, when I heard the words I never wanted to hear.

  “You might as well come out, Cyrus. We’ve got you surrounded.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, we. My sister Hortense has come to visit. I remembered that you have a friend, and that you didn’t want your friend to be without a woman, so I called Hortense and invited her to visit. Thanks for suggesting it, Cyrus.”

  “I didn’t suggest any such thing. Why don’t you and Horrible go to her place instead? What zoo does she live in, anyway?”

  “Cyrus. Oh, how sweet. You’re already kidding Hortense and you haven’t even met her yet. Hortense! Come here! Come and meet my little huggy bunny.”

  I saw my chance, slammed the door, locked it, and stumbled toward the back door that I hoped Hortense had abandoned. She had. I managed to get out and lock the door, and Lightning got up a full head of steam before Ugly and Uglier rounded the corner and almost got clipped by a runaway Volkswagen.

  +++

  Lou saw the painful expression on my face.

  “So, your next-door neighbor finally picked your lock.”

  “Not quite, but almost. In a way, it’s worse.”

  “She made you sign some note that the three of you will live together?”

  “Something like that, only it’s the four of us. Or should I say five?”

  “I didn’t sign anything, Cy, so keep me out of it. And what do you mean by five. Did she find another animal?”

  “In a way, but this one’s yours.”

  “The way you’re talking, Cy, she has a twin sister.”

  “Bingo.”

  “You mean she really has a twin sister?”

  “Surely I told you that before.”

  “If so, I managed to forget. Are they identical?”

  “Well, I didn’t hang around long enough to find out, but to a guy running for his life, they looked equally ugly. Now, let’s change the subject. I don’t want to think about my next-door neighbor this close to breakfast.”

  “Okay. The Road Not Taken.”

  “I’m not much on poetry, Lou, but I know Frost wrote that one. Has to do with choosing one of two ways to go in life. Don’t see what that has to do with our murder, but maybe time will enlighten us. Do you think it means that Tom Johnson hasn’t left town? He quit his job before the murder, and if he’s our murderer, you’d think he’d hightail it out of town, so I doubt if it has anything to do with him.”

  “If you’re through rambling, Cy, I’d like some breakfast.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Lightning lurched into action and before Lou and I could think of everything we wanted for breakfast, Lightning had slid into a spot right in front of the door of the Blue Moon.

  +++

  Properly nourished, Lou and I listened to our food sloshing around in our stomachs as we slid off our stools at the Blue Moon and navigated the few steps to Lightning. The two of us hoped that loose ends might allow us to solve the case, and the only loose ends we could see were how many pest control men made how many calls to the Colonel’s house, and did those calls have anything to do with the murder, or was it merely something else that was keeping us from solving the case.

  I recognized the man behind the counter at Dunleavy’s, and he recognized us.

  “Something else, Lieutenant?”

  “I want you to go through your records to make sure of the number of times you did work at the Hardesty home, the dates the calls were made, and who made the calls.”

  “I thought I gave that to you before, Lieutenant.”

  “You did, but what Mrs. Hardesty said doesn’t match what I remembered you to say. I want to double check to make sure.”

  A couple of minutes later, the man turned back from the computer to give me the information. His records showed two calls, not three, and one man, Tom Johnson, made both calls. He showed me where Johnson signed an electronic form after completing both calls. I wasn’t about to challenge that, because I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  +++

  “Lou, I think we need to take some time, sit down, and see if we can make sense of what we have.”

  “And we thought those word clues the Colonel left us were hard.”

  Lightning breathed hard as he dashed for my house. He slowed considerably when
he saw an intruder in our yard. I saw no ugly women, but a mangy mutt stood on my front porch, guarding the entrance. When she saw us, she perked up, jumped up and down, and began to bark. I feared for my safety, reached into my pocket, pulled out a Hershey bar and tossed it into the yard. The white rat darted toward the candy, just as two ugly women sprang from the front door of the house next door. As the dog dashed to the Hershey bar, Lou and I lumbered toward the front door of my house.

  “Cyrus, you don’t give a dog chocolate,” I heard my neighbor screech as she lunged to intercept the chocolate before the dog grabbed it.

  “Acne problems?”

  “No, it could kill Twinkle Toes.”

  “Any chance it might do the same to you?”

  “No, Cyrus, I’m fit as a fiddle.”

  I could see that she and I had different opinions of a fiddle. Regardless, she needed to be restrung, and it would’ve been worth a chance to see what a good strong sandpapering might do to her.

  I almost thought about my next-door fiddle too long, because she’d captured the candy wrapper from the dog’s teeth and was looking to sink her fangs into my hide. If the two women hadn’t tripped over each other, each trying to be the first one to my front porch, Lou and I would’ve been goners. One woman’s shoulder collided with the other one’s jaw. I was curious to see if the collision improved either woman’s looks, but not curious enough to put myself on the endangered species list.

  +++

  “Okay, Lou. Let’s take a look at what we have and see if we can make any sense out of all this. We have our friend, the Colonel, dead. We know that he was killed by a poisoned dart from a blowgun, and that the person who killed him stood in the passageway and blew the deadly object through a hole in the bookcase, then retrieved it by a string that was attached to the dart. But why would someone retrieve the object?”

  “Maybe because they can tell so much by DNA these days. Of course, it could’ve been that the murderer was hoping that Frank would diagnose that the Colonel’s death was due to a heart attack. There are a lot of similarities between the two types of deaths, at least as far as they might be perceived.”

  “Still, whatever the case, I don’t think any of that will lead us to one person over another. So, let’s look at all our suspects, and whatever motives each one might have. We’ll begin at home, and work our way to a distance. First, we have Martha. Martha could’ve wanted the Colonel’s money, and she could’ve sneaked back home, murdered our friend, and left before his friend Joe was due to arrive. But I can’t buy that. I think the Colonel would’ve given Martha anything she wanted. I think the same is true for each of his granddaughters, although either of them could’ve committed the murder, because one of them had skipped her last class and the other one was out of class in time to come home, commit the murder, and leave. And if it was Jennifer, did that mean that she and her husband did it together? They both said they were together at the time of the murder. Yet neither has a witness that they actually saw that house that Scott wants them to move into. Was the Colonel so against that, and Scott so much in favor of that, that he was willing to murder the Colonel to get what he wanted? On the surface, I’d say ‘no,’ but stranger things have happened.”

  “I can’t see the family doing it, either, Cy. Nor do I think the boarder, Tom Brockman, did it. What was his motive?”

  “I can’t see any motive for him, either, but he did say he was in his office, and others said he wasn’t.”

  We continued to mull over the possibility that someone who lived in the house murdered the Colonel, but we could come up with no likely suspect. I doubted if we’d fare better when we got to the more likely suspects who lived somewhere else, but someone had to have done it.

  We changed focus for a few minutes and tried to make sense of the day’s clue. “The Road Not Taken.” Did it mean that someone didn’t go somewhere they were supposed to have gone, or that someone chose one thing instead of another. We focused on the first. Could it mean that Martha never left the house that day until after she murdered her husband? The autopsy did show that the Colonel hadn’t eaten any lunch. Was it because he was too busy doing something else, or because someone kept him from eating. He wasn’t tied up. And he had been out that day, even if his wife hadn’t. He had been out, hadn’t he? Wasn’t the day he died, the day he set up his second camera? Or was it merely the day he provided the clues for us? Everything was becoming jumbled in my mind, but then those things happen sometimes when the case doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Too bad the Colonel hadn’t installed cameras on the front and back doors. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t have done us much good, unless someone in the house did it and he or she donned the disguise while inside the house. But that doesn’t make any sense, either, and three witnesses saw the long-haired, bearded character outside the house. I’d been at this case so long it was hard to keep each thing straight.

  It was time to line up the M&Ms, and break out a new bar of Hershey chocolate. Any excuse would’ve worked for Lou and me to turn to our candy, but to improve our thinking seemed like a worthy candidate.

  I would like to say that the candy enlightened us enough that we solved the case before lunch, but if that were to be true, we would’ve solved it the first day. Things were almost so bad that Lou and I wished for another puzzle. Almost, but not quite.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Rosie chastised us for eating lunch somewhere else the day before, but wiped our shovels and handed them to us. We were back in her good graces. Of course we knew that we had the upper hand. If we quit eating there, the Blue Moon would have to find forty men to replace us, or close to forty. Rosie didn’t want either to happen.

  By the time we’d left the Blue Moon and returned to my place, we’d reaffirmed that meringue sticks to lips and teeth, although neither of us knew the reason why. Nor were we determined to find out. We had enough to worry about. If we found out some day that some person died because meringue stuck to his or her teeth, we’d give the issue more time. Until then, we’d stick to solving murders.

  +++

  “Well, Lou, we really accomplished a lot this morning. What say we get back to the case at hand and pin this murder on someone?”

  “Does it have to be the guilty person?”

  “Either that or Belding. He committed murder in his heart. He would’ve done it if he thought he could get away with it, and it could’ve been him, but let’s wait on him. Let’s start closer to home. Bob Downey. Maybe Downey didn’t see anyone, and sneaked over when no one was home and committed the murder.”

  “So, what’s his motive, Cy?”

  “There you go, Lou, trying to complicate things. What do we know about this guy, anyway?”

  “Well, he was a trucker, and as far as we know, he had no ties to Hilldale until he moved here.”

  “So, do we eliminate him?”

  “I don’t think we eliminate anyone, Cy, but he doesn’t seem as likely a suspect as some of these guys. And besides, we know that Downey was telling the truth. Two other guys saw the long-haired man with the beard, and he was telling the truth when he told us he was a trucker.”

  “Still, what’s to keep him from donning a disguise, sneaking over here and murdering the Colonel?”

  “Nothing, but what’s his motive? A dispute over the property line?”

  “Okay, let’s move on. Next we have Joe Guilfoyle. Supposedly he was a friend of the Colonel’s for a long time. What could’ve made him snap and kill his friend? He could’ve been slipping out of the house, instead of trying to get in, when Martha returned home the day of the murder. But my gut feeling tells me he really was a friend of the Colonel, and that we need to look elsewhere to find our killer.”

  “I agree.”

  “What about the maid and handyman?”

  “Supposedly, she has an alibi. Maybe she’s the only one who does. Supposedly she was cleaning someone’s house that day. Her husband left, but she didn’t. And what’s their motive?”
/>
  “Only one possibility that I can think of. Maybe the Colonel found out something about one of them, probably Earl, and confronted him, and threatened to tell everyone the Hoskinses worked for.”

  “It would’ve been hard for them to find other families to replace the ones they lost. No one lets just anyone into their homes these days, especially doesn’t hire them, without references. People who fire you don’t provide references.”

  “Next. Staying in town, let’s tackle Michael Belding.”

  “I’d love to, Cy.”

  “He had a motive, and he has no alibi. Home sick, so he says. No witnesses. But if he is our guy, and he’s never left town, why did he wait so long to kill the Colonel?”

  “To keep himself from being suspected.”

  “But it didn’t work.”

  “But he wouldn’t know that.”

  “Okay, we’ll keep him in the mix. Let’s go on. How about Tom Johnson? He was in the house. We don’t know if he was there once, twice, three times, or more, but we know he was there. That means he had a chance to steal a key, or make an imprint of one. Now what reason he’d have for murdering the Colonel, I’ve no idea. He seems unlikely, except for the fact that there is a discrepancy on how many times he was in the house, and he’s disappeared.”

  “Cy, have you thought about why the pest control company says one thing, and Martha says another? Do you think Dunleavy’s is trying cover up something, is Martha trying to divert suspicion to someone else, or is it merely a fact of faulty memory?”

  “All are possible, but why would the company not admit to a third call, unless the third call was on the day of the murder, which it wasn’t? And why does one person say there were two calls made by the same man, and another says there were three calls, each made by someone different? Not only could Martha be trying to divert suspicion to the pest control company, but someone else, who actually murdered the Colonel, could be doing so, too. It could be that Tom Johnson is off somewhere, taking care of his mother, and that that is all there is to it.

  “Before we move on to someone else, there’s something else to consider. Neither Bob Downey, Michael Belding, Carl Bauerman, or Michael Terloff could’ve had a key to the house. None of them have ever been in the house. And two people saw someone enter the house using a key. More than likely, that person was our murderer. Everyone who lives there has a key. Anyone else who has visited the house could’ve stolen one when they were there. According to Martha, no keys were ever kept downstairs, so whoever stole a key, provided a key was stolen, had to have been in the upstairs of the house at one time or another. More than likely, at some point during their acquaintanceship, Joe Guilfoyle has been upstairs. The maid and handyman have been upstairs. And one, two, or three men who worked for the pest control company have been upstairs, but some of our suspects have never been in the house. At least as far as we know, and Martha concurs.”