“I apologize for my young friend’s rude behavior,” Shirley said merrily, looming above Mrs. Hobson, who stared straight ahead, putting her eye level with Shirley’s chest. “She is under a great deal of stress.”
“There’s no excuse for bad manners,” Mrs. Hobson said disdainfully, with a sniff of her slightly snub nose. “And we’re all under stress of one kind or another.”
“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Hobson,” Shirley said, nodding her head. “A deceptively simple statement that holds a great deal of truth. In some ways is it not the great battle of life? To hold your head high and maintain your standards while dealing with whatever obstacles are thrown your way? Or, as we choose to put it in the modern age, while you are under stress? A word I despise, by the way. It lacks vitality.”
“I suppose,” Mrs. Hobson said reluctantly while Shirley peered down at her, awaiting a response. It was clear Mrs. Hobson suspected she was being condescended to, but couldn’t be quite sure.
“You do much more than merely suppose, Mrs. Hobson,” Shirley replied with a wag of her finger. “Your wisdom may be simple, but it is true. Do not underestimate its value. I believe that we do the good and simple people such as yourself an injustice when we ignore your plain wisdom—a wisdom that is not so plain after all.”
Judging by the severity of her scowl and the glint in her narrowed eye—which stood in stark contrast above her cheery, ruffled apron—Mrs. Hobson did not appear to be flattered by what Shirley, no doubt, thought was the highest praise she could have bestowed upon her.
“You appear out of sorts,” Shirley continued without missing a beat. “Have you thought any more about my suggestion to form a bowling league? I believe the recreation and companionship of other good, simple people would do you a world of good. As well as Tammy here.”
“I told you before I don’t have time for bowling.” Mrs. Hobson began tapping her fingers impatiently on top of the counter. “Now, what can I get you? I’m extremely busy. I need to get ready for the lunch crowd,” she added after I glanced around at the tables, mostly empty except for two women nursing their coffees and one man immersed in his newspaper.
We placed our order and a few minutes later stepped outside with our coffees and donuts.
“Where could she be?” Shirley asked after we stood there a moment looking around without seeing any sign of Angie.
“Maybe she went into that alley next to the building to have her cigarette?” I suggested.
“I see no smoke. But perhaps she has just put out her cigarette.”
We waited for a couple of minutes, but Angie did not reappear. We walked over to the alley, but she wasn’t there.
“How very odd,” Shirley mused. “She seemed quite interested in the prospect of enjoying one of these jelly donuts.”
“Maybe she got bored and went into one of the shops,” I said, looking around at the possibilities. There were two antique stores, a used bookstore, a trophy shop, a property management business, a flower store, and a consignment shop featuring vintage shoes, clothing, and home furnishings.
“Quite possibly,” Shirley replied. “Angie has her strengths, but prominent among them is not, I believe, a long attention span. I will take this side of the street and you take the other, and we shall meet back here in front of Hobson’s Bakery.”
Half an hour later, after going into every business on my side of the street, I returned to find Shirley waiting for me, tapping her right foot impatiently on the sidewalk.
“No luck,” I said, stopping next to Shirley as a young couple walked around us and then made their way to the door of Hobson’s Bakery. “No one has seen her.”
“I had already deduced that from the slump in your shoulders as you crossed the street,” Shirley snapped. “And then there is, of course, the quite obvious fact that neither of us has Angie Berger by our side. Hence, the results of our search have been fruitless.”
“Sorry,” I snapped back sarcastically. “I never claimed to be a world-class detective.”
“No,” Shirley said after a moment, looking up and down the street. “It is I who should apologize. I have developed a fondness for that rather rude young woman. And I took my worry out on you.” Shirley turned toward me abruptly and snapped her fingers. “Come! Standing here worrying is doing neither Angie nor us any good. Let us expand our search down to the next block.”
We spent another hour searching—each of us taking opposite sides of the street—until we had covered a three-block radius. But Angie was nowhere to be found.
Chapter 12
When we returned to the office after our fruitless search for Angie, Shirley and I retreated to her office with our coffee and pastry.
“I was in the middle of scanning this morning’s edition of the Springville Voice,” she told me as I sat down in one of the chairs across from her desk, “to ascertain what information I could find regarding Matt Peterman’s murder, when Angie made her appearance. It was a front-page story, but the information is sketchy at best.”
“I read it, too,” I said. The story that morning hadn’t added any new details from what I’d read in the online edition the day before. “The police probably know a lot more than they’re saying.”
“Hmph!” Shirley snorted with disdain. “I have my doubts. But to return to the subject at hand, Angie, looking quite distraught, then told me that the Browns came to the Pittfords’ house around eight-thirty this morning. At first they behaved much as they had during our last encounter: smiling and asking about the Pittfords, etc. Angie told them she was busy trying to cook the Pittfords’ breakfast and attempted to shut the door, and that’s when things, according to Angie, took an ominous turn.”
“According to Angie?” I asked, noting how she had emphasized that phrase.
“Yes. Please keep in mind, Tammy, that when conducting an investigation one has to rely on an assortment of stories, and that each story is no more than an individual’s version of events. That version will be colored by that individual’s personal biases and self-interest. To say nothing of the people who simply lie. I do not believe that Angie is lying, mind you. But rather, that her version of this morning’s events are colored by her mysterious hostility for the Browns. To continue, according to Angie, Chuck Brown then put his foot on the doorstep to hold the door open and told her that smoking wasn’t good for her health. Angie said that he kept smiling like a Muppet on speed—she has a way with words, don’t you think? Very descriptive in her own way.”
“Yes. Very descriptive,” I agreed, still amazed that Shirley had taken such a shine to Angie, even if she did question the veracity of her story.
“And then he said it was especially dangerous to smoke at night by herself. She might want to watch herself since her new friends wouldn’t always be around. It might be better to quit smoking. At which point, according to Angie, he asked her if she knew the best way to quit smoking. By this time she claims that she was terrified and all she could do was stand there. ‘By keeping your mouth shut,’ Mr. Brown supposedly told her.”
“Keeping her mouth shut?” I asked. “About what?”
“An excellent question, Tammy, and one that Angie herself could not answer. After this threat was made, according to Angie, Chuck Brown smiled, removed his foot from the door, and left with his wife, who called out a cheerful good-bye.”
I shivered at that picture and took a sip of my coffee. Something about the story was nagging at me—something didn’t fit—but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“I guess we better call the police,” I said, thinking we had no choice.
“And tell them what?” Shirley asked, sounding surprised.
“The Browns threatened her,” I replied, also surprised. “And now she’s missing.”
“Did they? Is she? Should we take her story at face value? Angie makes no attempt to hide her dislike for the Browns, which colors her judgment. Perhaps all that happened this morning is that the Browns came by at an inopportune time. They had no more
sinister design than to check in on their neighbors, and then some casual comment is made about her smoking. But in Angie’s mind everything becomes ominous and within seconds she has herself believing that she was menaced and threatened. She adds details to the story without even being aware of it. I have made a rather thorough study of the manifestations of human memory, and it is, to put it mildly, not always to be trusted. To put it in layman’s terms, we believe what we want to believe. I have no doubt that Angie believes every word she says; I do have doubts as to its accuracy.
“And as for your second statement, we do not know for a fact that she is missing. She may have spotted a friend. Or remembered she was late for a dental appointment. Or decided that there was nothing we could do to help her. And we certainly have no proof that the Browns had anything to do with her disappearance, and to me the idea seems rather ludicrous. As to your suggestion that we contact the police, Angie is a grown woman, free to come and go as she pleases. We have no evidence that would compel them to begin a search.”
“So you’re not worried about her?”
“I…choose not to be until I have sufficient reason. There is always the possibility that the murderer, whose identity is still unknown to us, may have followed her here, and that her disappearance is a result of that visit. Therefore, keeping in mind that possibility, what is the next logical step for us?”
“Solving the case?”
“Exactly!” Shirley exclaimed, clapping her hands together twice like a schoolteacher thrilled to learn that her pupil has mastered the multiplication tables. “And what do you believe we need to do in order to solve the case?”
“Well,” I said slowly, but there was no way around it. “I guess we have to go back to Matt Peterman’s house and try to find the source of the invisible dog.”
“That is true. Somewhere outside Matt Peterman’s house there has to be some evidence of that infernal dog. But is that our next step?”
“I guess. Wait…” I paused as an idea started taking form in my head. “That’s what we assumed, that dog barking had to be outside somewhere in his or someone else’s yard. But what if the evidence is on the inside? That could be where the barking came from. And that would explain why nobody else ever heard it.”
“Of course,” Shirley said. “There were always just those two possibilities. The barking could only have come from either the outside or the inside. And since we have searched the outside, the next step must be to search the inside. That’s where I tried to steer the conversation, and I am happy that you were able to reach that most obvious conclusion in such a short amount of time. Excellent, Tammy. You put Watson to shame. However,” she added, drumming her fingers on top of her desk as I took another sip of coffee, “that is not the next step.” A few more seconds passed silently, and I could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock.
“The office!” she exclaimed suddenly, startling me right as I went to set down my cup of coffee. I grabbed the edge of the cup just in the nick of time, only spilling a few drops on my hand instead of all over her scattered piles of papers and books. “We must go to the office!”
“Um,” I said, confused. “Isn’t this your office?”
“Obviously this is my office,” she retorted, marching over to her bookshelf and snatching up the dreaded hat. “I refer, of course, to Matt Peterman’s office, a conclusion you would have undoubtedly reached for yourself had you taken sufficient time to think about my statement. There are two crime scenes in this case, and we have, as yet, only concentrated on one of them,” she added as she plopped that ridiculous hat on top her head. “I will thoroughly examine the spot where Matt Peterman met his unfortunate demise, no doubt finding clues that have gone unnoticed by the police. From there I will proceed to his office and see what, if anything, we might discover there.”
“Okay,” I said hesitantly, as I pictured Shirley Homes marching into an insurance office with her hat, and her cane, and her way of talking to people.
“Well?” she asked, staring down at me.
“Coming,” I said with a sigh.
—
When Shirley gave me the address for Matt’s office, I had a pretty good idea how sad it would be. It was located on the west side of Springville, which had definitely seen better days. The west side starts about two blocks beyond Merilee Community College, and has always struggled, but the recession had a devastating effect. The first time I drove through the west side after I returned from L.A. I was pretty shocked at how bad things had become. There have been a lot of foreclosures and failed businesses, so there are boarded-up windows and abandoned homes scattered all throughout that part of town. Most of the apartment complexes in the area have taken a turn for the worse, too. Blankets hang in the windows instead of blinds, and paint peels off front doors that look out onto trashy parking lots, brown grass, and dead shrubbery.
Matt’s office was located about three blocks west of Merilee College. There were four businesses in his small plaza, with dirty white stucco on the outside, and one small planter on the edge of the parking lot, filled with crushed beer cans, fast-food remains, and cigarette butts. Whatever plants had once lived there were long gone, leaving no trace. The business on the far left was vacant, the one on the right was a pawnshop, cash checking, and payday loan franchise, while next to Matt’s small office was a Chinese takeout restaurant with cartoonish chopsticks painted on the front door.
We pulled into the back alley behind his office first so that Shirley could revisit the scene of the crime. It was narrow and dark, the surface filled with cracks and potholes. A tall cement and brick wall covered with graffiti bordered it on one side; the businesses in Matt’s plaza bordered it on the other. Each had a large metal trash can next to their back door.
I sat in the car while Shirley walked slowly down one side of the alley and then the other, stopping every few feet to peer down at the pavement or a spot on the wall through a small magnifying glass she’d pulled from her pocket. Her head would nod frequently, and then she would resume her search.
Fifteen minutes later, apparently satisfied that there was no hidden clue waiting in the alley that would burst the case wide open, Shirley returned to my car.
“No trace of the murderer. He—or she—has covered their tracks nicely, quite like the invisible dog. We have our work cut out for us, Tammy. Yes, indeed.”
Shirley directed me to pull out to the street and around to the front. As we entered the parking lot the only place that seemed to be doing any business at all was the pawnshop. I could see a group of people inside lined up at a counter, and a young couple stood by the front door, arguing. They were both pale and skinny, with hair so blond it was almost white, wearing old sweatshirts and torn blue jeans that were falling halfway down their hips. She kept scratching one of her arms as the two of them took turns shouting at each other.
The Chinese restaurant was empty except for one skinny elderly Asian woman I could spot through the window, dressed in a red silk shirt, and sitting behind the counter, staring vacantly out the window.
In front of Matt Peterman’s office sat an old beat-up gold El Camino with newspapers stuffed into the large hole in the center of the passenger-side window. I pulled up next to the El Camino, and as I did the shouting in front of the loan franchise came to a halt, and I felt the young couple following us with their eyes.
“Well,” I said, putting the car into park and shutting off the engine as Shirley sat beside me, unmoving, silent, lost in her own thoughts, as she had been for the entire journey. “Here we are.”
“Yes, indeed,” Shirley replied jauntily, sitting up straight and gazing around as she came out of her reverie. “And we are in luck. I see a young woman inside Matt’s office sitting at a desk and talking on the phone. His secretary, no doubt, and, therefore, a most promising source of information.” I followed her gaze through the crooked off-white blinds hanging in the window, and saw what to me appeared to be a most unpromising source of information. The woman was
young—probably no more than eighteen or nineteen—and had short purple spiked hair, wore a low-cut sweater leaving visible both her ample cleavage and her many arm tattoos, and was waving her hands back and forth wildly while she talked on the office phone with the headset cradled beside her ear on her right shoulder. I had a pretty strong feeling she wasn’t discussing business; and an even stronger feeling as to how she would most likely react when her world collided with that of Shirley Homes.
“Um,” I said as Shirley went to reach for the door handle. “About the, um, hat…”
“Yes?” she asked icily, turning to face me with a hard glint in her eyes. I was treading on sacred territory now, and I knew that I would have to proceed carefully.
“It’s just that…” I said slowly, stalling for a moment so that I’d put this just right. But I could feel that unhappy young couple in front of the pawnshop staring over at us, and the last thing I really wanted at that point was to call more attention to ourselves than absolutely necessary. “I’m thinking if we want to get any information out of Matt’s secretary, then we probably need some kind of cover story.”
“My dear Tammy, I, of course, have already devised a cover story,” she replied frostily, her eyes unflinching. “I am here to purchase life insurance, and before doing so will have many pointed questions regarding the proprietor of this particular insurance firm. And when I am informed of Matt Peterman’s unfortunate demise, it will naturally lead to all sorts of other pointed questions. But I fail to see what any of this has to do with my choice of apparel.”
The Case of the Invisible Dog Page 16