4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4

by Frederick Ramsay

“How do you want me to do this?”

  “Henry, I don’t want to splinter that door so just aim at the lock, there, and bang it open.”

  “What? At the lock, not the panel?”

  “Yes, yes. That lock isn’t mortised in and the receiver—the place where the bolt goes isn’t either so…”

  “I got it. Step back, Mrs. Antonelli.”

  Henry swung the log back and then forward. On the second try the door smacked open.

  Rose pushed into the room. “Oh, my God, Jonathan, call 9-1-1. This man is hurt.” Anton Grotz lay face down on a frayed prayer rug, the back of his head a bloody mess. Henry knelt next to the body and felt for a pulse.

  “You need to call the sheriff, Mister Lydell. This dude’s dead. He’s been shot.”

  “Suicide?” Rose asked. Her knees began to buckle. “Oh my God.”

  “That’s for the sheriff to say, but he’s been shot in the back three times, it appears, and it don’t seem likely he’d practice on his back before putting the gun to his head.” Henry, bright red hair notwithstanding, seemed to have a fundamental grasp of forensics.

  Rose Antonelli collapsed onto a damask settee.

  ***

  “Where’re we headed?” Karl Hedrick held the wheel of the cruiser lightly and kept his eyes on the road.

  “Turn here,” Ike directed. “This is Old Coach Road. It used to be the main drag north and south for commercial travelers. The valley was connected by stage coaches up through the War Between the States. We didn’t get a railroad in these parts until about 1870. Col. Harmon assembled the financing to build the Valley Railroad. When it came, it ran closer to the valley pike—that’s old route 11—and through Picketsville, not Bolton. The coach stop fell into disuse then. Picketsville gained enough prominence to outrank it and finally incorporate Bolton as a suburb.”

  “Suburb?” Karl said with a smile. “Ike, with respect, Picketsville is hardly an ‘urb.’ Having a sub urb is a stretch.”

  “Nevertheless. Bolton is an old section, with homes dating to the early nineteenth century, and the house we are going to belongs to Jonathan Lydell. He is Old Valley.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “His family has been in the valley for God only knows how many generations, living in the same house, even. He is FFV, DAR, the Society of the Cincinnati, and on and on.”

  “FFV means what, exactly?”

  “Where do you come from, Karl?”

  “Originally or lately?”

  “Originally.”

  “Chicago, south side, down near the University.”

  “Okay. Well, FFV means First Families of Virginia. That is, people who can claim descent from the earliest settlers, colonial families at least.”

  “Are you FFV, Ike?”

  “You’re kidding, right? With a name like Schwartz, what’s the likelihood?”

  “No Jewish tailors on the…what was the name of the boat? Not the Mayflower.”

  “Not one. Three at first, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery,” Ike recited drawing from his sixth grade memory bank. “And then a succession of others. And no, they had enough trouble without that.”

  “My grandma used to say our family was related to Thomas Jefferson. Could I be an FFV?”

  “A word of advice. I wouldn’t bring that up, especially around Mr. Lydell. He’s among those who find the concept of Sally Hemings and her offline Jeffersonian descendents extremely upsetting. As I said, he’s Old Valley.”

  “I take it he’s going to have a problem when he sees the two of us—the Jewish sheriff and his African-American sidekick. Kosher Salt and Peppah, that’s us.”

  Ike smiled. “How long are you going to be with us, Karl? I don’t mean to push, but you’ve been on loan from the Bureau for months now.”

  “Can’t say, Ike. My hearing was set for January. Then my boss went one step too far and now he’s under review, and that leaves me in limbo, you might say.”

  Karl had crossed his boss once too often the previous winter and had been put on suspension. As a face saving device, that designation had been changed to inactive duty and finally to Agent in Place for Picketsville, even though there was no perceived need to have someone stationed there. So, Karl, like a latter-day McCloud, worked as a deputy sheriff in Picketsville while he waited for the wonks in Washington to work out his status with the Bureau.

  Ike pointed to the house in the middle of a cluster of brick two-story buildings lining the road. “Pull up here. That’s it. The one with what looks like a porch on the second floor.”

  The row of three 1820s era houses, each separated by fifty feet or so, was set back into a hillside. Time and nature had weathered them so that they seemed to blend into the landscape, their salmon bricks softened by the purple of the newly blooming Judas trees clustered between them. As they were positioned on the hillside, their basements were at ground level in the front. Their main floors, one story above, were accessed by stairs leading to broad porches across their façade, but were at grade to the rear. Lydell’s house had what appeared to be two front doors and looked like a modern duplex. One of the doors hung open.

  “Two doors?” Karl said, and retrieved a roll of crime scene tape from the cruiser.

  “Yeah. These old houses used to have rooms available if the inn was too crowded or a traveler wanted more privacy. The home owners would build a room separate from the rest of the house and rent it out to strangers—the stranger room.”

  The two climbed the steps to the porch. Jonathan Lydell, Henry Sutherlin, and a plump woman with her hair in a bun, clustered together in a ragged group, waiting.

  “You can tell your driver I won’t have that hideous yellow tape on my house,” Lydell said.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lydell, Henry…and, excuse me, you are?” Ike turned to the woman.

  “Rose Antonelli, Sheriff. Thank God you’re here.”

  “This is Karl Hedrick, Mr. Lydell. He is not my driver, he is a Deputy Sheriff and he will be conducting most of the investigation. As for the tape…it’s not an option. Until we’ve exhausted all the possibilities and the evidence technicians are done here, it goes up and stays up. You do have another entrance to your house around back, I assume.”

  Lydell, the product of another time and culture, at seventy-eight was used to having his own way, and certainly not open to taking orders from people like Ike Schwartz. As with most self-styled aristocrats, he despaired for a future when people with little or no family history assumed control. His face turned crimson and the blood vessels that wreathed his nose stood out like dark spider webs. Before he could answer, Ike stepped into the room, inspected the shattered door and the floor from the door sill to the body. He frowned.

  “The door was locked from the inside, you say?”

  “See for yourself, Sheriff.”

  Ike stepped back to the door. He slipped on latex gloves and removed the key.

  “There are other keys?”

  “Just this one.” Lydell produced a second key from his pocket and handed it to Ike.

  “They look different.”

  “Different locksmith, I expect. The one you have in your hand is probably the original and would date to the 1800s or 1820s. The one in the door, I would guess, was fashioned in the sixties—that would be the 1860s.”

  “I’m impressed. Karl, bag these two separately. I’ll want prints—the usual. No other keys? How did you manage to hang on to these so long?”

  “My ancestors were, among other things, packrats, Sheriff. I found a box of old keys, locks, and fasteners in a back room in the basement, under a hundred years of mouse droppings. Those two fit the lock that matched the original so I pulled them.”

  “Just these two?”

  “Just those two.”

  Ike stepped into the room. It smelled of recently applied latex paint. Without a window, only the lamp on the side table cut the gloom. He made a mental inventory of its furnishings. A small settee stood just beside the door. A
large four-poster bed dominated the center of the room. It had not been slept in. There were several heavy pieces of furniture, a walnut bureau and matching chifferobe. Two bedside tables and a delicate antebellum desk completed the décor. An open suitcase had been placed atop an old brass studded campaign trunk at the foot of the bed. The trunk had obviously been recently restored. He could just make out a set of elaborate initials engraved on a brass plate on its front. Several notebooks were scattered on the desk, one on the floor. The rug, on which the body lay sprawled, seemed out of place for a bedroom. Ike studied the body for a moment and returned to the door.

  “There’s no window in the room. Were the lamps on or off when you broke in?”

  Lydell hesitated and scratched his head. “On.”

  “Could I see that box?”

  “Box?”

  “Where you found the keys. That one.”

  Lydell seemed perplexed. “Now?”

  “Now would be good.”

  While they had been speaking, the evidence techs had arrived with a county ambulance. Ike set them to work and asked Karl to take statements from Henry Sutherlin and Rose Antonelli. He followed Lydell to the basement level.

  “Is your daughter home?”

  “Yes, but she is, ah…indisposed at the moment. If you wish to speak to her, later would be better.”

  Ike nodded. Lydell’s daughter drank, the gossips said. “The stranger room is directly above us, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose it would be asking too much for there to be a trapdoor.”

  “No trapdoor—no.”

  “No other access to the room from the outside?”

  “None.”

  An old memory—a childhood memory nagged at him—a locked room with a murder—something to do with the area’s history. He shook his head and sighed. Nothing ever came easy.

  Chapter 3

  As Ike and Lydell disappeared down the steps and into the basement, Karl finished attaching the yellow crime scene tape to the balusters on the porch and turned to Henry Sutherlin.

  “You’re Billy’s brother, aren’t you?”

  “That’s me…the black sheep of the family.” Then, glancing at Karl’s café au lait complexion added, “No offense.”

  “None taken. Why black sheep?”

  “Well, now you just lookit me, Mr. Deputy. Do I appear to you to be a law abiding, God fearing citizen, or do I look like someone you’d rather not introduce to your dear old momma?”

  Henry had converted his body into something approaching a billboard. In addition to his bright red Mohawk, which must have required a quart of mousse to hold it upright, he had acquired a panorama of colorful tattoos. In addition, he’d had a succession of tunnels inserted in his earlobes, so that now he had metal-rimmed, three-quarter inch holes in both of them. The stems of his sunglasses were slipped through each and the lenses rested on the nape of his neck. With his red hair spiked up, skimpy matching goatee, prominent hooked nose, and those wattle shaped earlobes, Henry looked more like barn fowl than one of the Sutherlin boys.

  “You sure you want me to answer that?”

  “Yep, why not?”

  “Well, Henry, I come from a part of society that regularly gets judged by the way we look. Profiling, they call it, so I’m not so quick to jump to the conclusions you just proposed.”

  “And…”

  “I will say this, if you look like anything, it’s a rooster, and no, I don’t think I’d take a chicken home to momma except she’s going to fry it up.”

  Henry gave Karl an appraising look and smiled. “It’s a pistol, don’t you think…my hair?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “So, you’re the new deputy.”

  “Nope. Just an out-to-pasture FBI agent on loan. I heard your brother hoped Ike would give you a shot at the job.”

  “Billy? Well, I reckon he might have done, but it ain’t never going to happen. I gave the Police Academy a go once and busted out. Ike, there, he ain’t likely to wait and see if I could make it through a second time.”

  “But you’d like to do police work?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. I’d have to lose all this, you know—all my hair and such, so I ain’t all that keen.”

  The two leaned on the porch railing and stared across the street where Mrs. Antonelli, pointing periodically at the house, was in animated conversation with one of her lodgers. Henry pulled out a rumpled package of Marlboros and shook one out.

  “Lydell, he don’t like us smoking around the house.” Henry lit up and exhaled a plume of smoke in the general direction of Mrs. Antonelli.

  “Tell me about Lydell, your boss.”

  “Well he isn’t rightly my boss. I work for Mr. Wainwright. He has a dairy farm about a quarter mile up the road from here. Lydell sort of rents me from time to time, you might say.”

  “What’s he like, Lydell, I mean, to work for?”

  “He’s okay, I guess. Sort of snooty and stuck up, like. He’s old and creaky so he can’t do much of the heavy lifting, see, so he gets me to come down couple times a week to catch up on the work he can’t do.”

  “Pay good?”

  “Nah. He’s a tightwad, he is.”

  “But you need the money.”

  Henry spread his arms wide exposing more skin art. “Hey, how else you think I pay for all this?”

  “Right.”

  They continued their inspection of the bed and breakfast across the street. A small breeze chased a scrap of paper across the road and plastered it against a fence post. Mrs. Antonelli had retreated into the relative gloom of her building. Henry flipped his cigarette into the street, and watched as it hit the macadam, and exploded into a cloud of sparks.

  “He’s a author, you know.”

  “Who, Lydell?”

  “Yeah, he’s wrote a half dozen books. Maybe more.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, boring stuff. About his family and how important they are. Historical stuff. Only I call it hysterical stuff.”

  “Family history, like that?”

  “Yeah. He’s one of them guys, wished he was a big shot, like a Duke or a Earl. Always thinks because his granddaddy fought in this war, and his great granddaddy fought in that’n, he’s more important than people.”

  “Ike says he’s FFV. That so?”

  “FFV? Oh yeah, First Fools of Virginia. Yep he’s pretty proud of that. He has a DAR certificate up on the wall, too, just in case you need to know how far back him and his family goes. And if that ain’t enough, there’s them books.”

  “You read any of them?”

  “Me? You got to be kidding. Who wants to spend hours reading about the Lydells, then and now?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody must, because he’s published the books.”

  “He paid to get them books printed up. See that shed up there?” Henry gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “It’s loaded with cases of his books. He’s sent copies to all his buddies and the local libraries and he still has himself a passel of them tucked away in there.”

  Karl hitched himself around to look at the house wall. “This house is old, Ike says.”

  “Old and creepy. I don’t get what people see in these old dumps. Folks from up north pile into the valley and pay big bucks for them. Me? I wouldn’t give you a dollar and a half for any of them. They’re all broke down and need somebody working on them twenty-four seven.”

  “Lydell’s family has owned this house for a long time, that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s what he says. He’s taken to restoring it like it was back in the day.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, you know, like, putting those old-time doors and locks on things. He’s rebuilding the slave quarters out back. Do you believe that? Buys old log cabins in Tennessee and ships them up here. He’s got three of them out back.”

  “Slave quarters?”

  “Yep.”

  “You did say slave?”

&nb
sp; “Yeah, come on, I’ll show you.”

  ***

  Ike expected the basement to be draped in cobwebs. It was remarkably clean and tidy with only the faintest hint of antique basement damp. He supposed Lydell’s reference to mouse droppings was a bit of hyperbole. The two of them made their way to the rear. A small window set high on the wall allowed sunlight to filter in from the back garden. Its slanted rays lighted a workbench covered with tools in various states of disrepair. Miscellaneous hardware, some rusted, some relatively new, sat on shelves and cabinets, in old mayonnaise jars filled with an olio of screws and bolts, in boxes, and piles. In the center of the bench sat a wooden container filled, as Lydell had predicted, with lock parts and keys.

  “You have quite a collection here, sir.”

  “We Lydell’s have always been packrats, I’m afraid. Family trait. There are the items you wanted to inspect.” Lydell waved in the direction of the box. “I must say, it would be convenient if you would complete your inspection of my keys as soon as possible. When I can, I want to repair my door and I will need a key.”

  “We’ll do what we can. How is your daughter taking this? We’ll need her statement.”

  “She may not be aware of the circumstances. She is as I said, indisposed. I will inform her of your request. Perhaps this afternoon would do.”

  Ike picked a few rusty keys and tarnished lock parts from the box and inspected them. “I’d say you had enough bits and pieces here to make half a dozen locks if you wanted to.”

  “Yes, well, perhaps. I am not particularly mechanical, but I expect a locksmith could. I was looking for a key to that old trunk up in the stranger room.”

  “It’s a family heirloom?”

  Lydell hesitated, frowned, and scratched his temple. “I’ve no idea. As I said, we are a family of packrats.”

  Ike turned his attention back to the box and rummaged some more. Lydell shuffled his feet, from annoyance or anxiety, Ike couldn’t be sure. Agitated is what Ike guessed, but agitated about what? He gathered up the odd bits he’d placed on the table and stopped. “What’s this thing?” He held up a device that looked like a small crank.

  “Oh, if I’m not mistaken, that is a very old clock winder. It works like a clock key only it’s constructed like a crank, instead. That configuration allows it to create enough mechanical advantage so winding a heavy spring or lifting weights could be done easily.”