4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Sir?”

  “I think you are working with someone in the sheriff’s office on that murder, and I don’t like it.”

  “Well, actually, I am, but it ain’t formal or anything, you know, just me and Billy trying to see who can figure it out first, is all.”

  “You and Billy. That would be your brother, William?”

  “He ain’t a William, just Billy. Yep…that is, yes sir.”

  “Not working with that Schwartz fellow?”

  “Ike? No, he ain’t dealing with me at the moment.”

  “I see.” Lydell didn’t see but he let it pass. Clearly, more discreet inquiries were in order. “About the documents. Again, have you seen anything like them…like these?” He pulled a few sheets from the file case and waved them in Henry’s direction.

  “I might have, now you mention it.”

  “Where?” Lydell could not hide the excitement in his voice.

  “Maybe…I can’t be sure, but I saw Miss Martha Marie reading something that looked like them the other day. Out by the log pile you have out there for making the slave cabins.”

  “My daughter?”

  “Maybe. But it could have been some letters she had. She’s back there a lot with her old letters. I think they must be love letters or the like. Sometimes she cries. But that could be because she’s…you know.”

  “Yes, yes. Well, thank you, Henry. That will be all.”

  Henry gathered his boots and left. Lydell saw the small clumps of mud that fell from their soles and frowned. Bumpkin. So, Martha Marie was reading letters out by the shed, was she? Or was she reading his papers? If the latter, what had she done with them? And she’d been talking with that man, Grotz. What did they talk about?

  “Martha Marie,” he shouted. “Where are you?” No answer, as usual. He stepped outside. No sign of Henry. The axe leaned against the shed wall. The wood pile had been split and stacked. The thought crossed his mind that he might have underestimated Henry. Henry was a very clever fellow. The question was, how clever?

  “Martha Marie,” he repeated. He thought he heard a noise in the shed. “Em, is that you?”

  “Nobody here but us chickens,” she giggled.

  He pulled the shed door open. His daughter sat on a box of his books, a bottle of wine in her hand.

  “You caught me, Daddy. Now I have to find a new place for my stash.”

  “You are a disgrace.” He turned on his heel and stalked back to the house. “A disgrace,” he repeated, although he doubted she heard him or, if she did, cared. He thought he heard her reply but did not respond. A disgrace, a bad apple that fell from the family tree. How did this happen?

  The phone was ringing when he reached the cool gloom of the house. He picked up. Betsy Blessing. He listened as she recited the details of Ike Schwartz’s last visit. She wanted to know if he was in the market for more keys, winders, or lock parts. What was that woman after? Did she think she knew something? This whole project was becoming much too complicated. He’d had enough. It was time to call the mayor.

  Chapter 14

  When Ike entered the office, everyone began talking at once. Sam and Karl wanted to tell him about the previous, historical, murder at Bellmore. They’d Googled the information and printed out portions of the local newspaper for the date. Essie needed a moment of his time. She had a problem. The mayor’s office had called and would again. The mayor sounded upset, and Ruth left a cryptic message, something about Karl Marx. Ike would understand. Did he? He held up his hands for silence.

  “Yes, boys and girls, I do know about that murder. Those of us raised in this part of the world grew up with it. I can give you five minutes, Essie, but it better be important and I think she meant Groucho, not Karl, and he said a lot of things but I think I know what she’s referring to, yes, but with Ms. Harris you can never be sure.”

  The three of them paused and then began again.

  “Stop. Enough, already. What I want to know is, has anyone done any constructive work on the case? What came over from the medical examiner’s office and the evidence techs?”

  Karl cleared his throat and reported that Lydell’s daughter had no information. She’d had a drink with Grotz, chatted briefly, and then taken sleeping pills and gone to bed. She didn’t hear anything, see anything, or know anything. He was inclined to believe her. “Booze and pills, bad combination.”

  Billy Sutherlin strolled in, sailed his Stetson across the room where it lit on a peg by the front door. With a superior smile, he announced that he had, in fact, gone over the evidence technician’s report.

  “At last, a policeman reports for duty.” Ike waved Billy into his office and beckoned the others to follow. Essie started to protest. “Later, Essie, I promise.”

  When they were seated, or arranged against the wall, Ike nodded to Billy to begin. The phone rang. Essie wig-wagged for Ike to pick up. Neither she nor Ike had mastered the intercom. He put the call on speaker. It was time his people heard some of the nonsense he had to deal with every day.

  “Hello, Tom. How’re things in the mayor’s office?”

  “Funny you should ask that, Ike. I just had a call from Jonathan Lydell and he wanted to know the same thing. ’Fore I could answer he lit into me about you and yours. What’s going on with his investigation?”

  “Not his, Tom, ours. We are making progress.” He looked to Billy, who grinned an assent.

  “Lydell wants his keys back.”

  “He can have them…” Billy put thumb to forefinger in an okay sign, “tomorrow. That is, unless we need to run a trace.” Ike wasn’t sure what run a trace meant, exactly. He’d heard the term used on one of the seemingly infinite permutations of TV’s CSI and thought it sounded important. He had an idea, but except on the TV, and perhaps at the Bureau, no lab to his knowledge, could do much more than run fingerprints and, if they had time, DNA samples, but that could take weeks or months.

  “Well, that’s good,” the mayor said. Obviously, he watched the same shows. “Ballistics turn up anything?” Billy shook his head. Ike frowned a what? Billy waved a page at Ike. “Have to get back to you on that, Tom. Apparently, there are some questions needing answers.” Of course there were. That is the nature of questions, but the mayor seemed not to notice. “The victim’s wife will be in on the weekend and we’re hoping she can fill us in on what he was doing in the valley.”

  “She’s just getting in? I’d a thought she’d pop right down being it’s her husband. Where’s she from, anyway?”

  “New Jersey. She said she couldn’t get off work. I gather she and Mr. Grotz were not getting along lately.”

  “Well, you put your A-team on this one, Ike. Lydell is a player.”

  “You got it, Tom.”

  He hung up. “Our mayor watches too much television. Okay Billy, what’s the story on the ballistics?”

  “On page five,” he said. “The lab says the weapon used was pretty old and probably not fired lately. Whoever did it wasn’t a gun expert. They think it probably hadn’t been cleaned in a coon’s age. The slug, they say, is, like, an old fashioned lead one. The kind they ain’t made in years.”

  “Caliber, make?”

  “Now, that’s the good part. It’s a…” Billy consulted the report, “.455 caliber, from a Webley, MKII, they think.”

  “What’s good about that?” Sam asked.

  “How many World War I or II Webley’s can there be in the neighborhood?”

  “Point made,” Ike said. “But there is no guarantee that it’s local. Talk to me about the condition of the slug.”

  “Old, out of date, lead, from a pistol that had not been fired, perhaps even cleaned in a long time,” Billy repeated.

  Karl scratched his chin. “Which would indicate an amateur who pulled the piece from a drawer or cabinet or—”

  “A woman,” Sam said.

  “Why a woman?” Ike asked.

  “I can count on the thumbs of one hand, the number of women of my acquaintance who hav
e even a rudimentary knowledge of guns—cleaning, maintenance, and so on. It sounds like the person who did this found the gun locked away or stored, lugged it to the scene, and blam. That, to me spells angry female, spur of the moment.”

  “Anybody who watches TV knows how to aim and shoot. At close range, they can probably kill their victim. Cleaning up afterward is another matter,” Karl said.

  “You know what I like about them TV shows that show people shooting? They have the bad guy hold the gun sideways, you know, with the gun butt parallel to the ground. Man, that has probably saved more lives than the Red Cross,” Billy said.

  Essie, tired of being left out of the conversation, had joined the group, asked why.

  “’Cause the only way the barrel gets pointed in the right direction is if you cock your arm sideways or twist your wrist all funny. Otherwise, you’re shooting off to the right every time. That gives the shootee a chance.”

  “Okay.” Ike reassumed control. “Theoretically, we can’t rule out the daughter. Although why she’d do it is pretty hard to figure. What else is in the report?”

  “Nothing on the clothes or furniture. Fingerprints all belong to Grotz, the lady who cleans, that’d be Charlie Picket’s mom, and a few of Mr. Lydell. The only thing I can see that might be worth something is the books.”

  “Books? What kind of books?”

  “Well, he had a library book checked out of the Passaic Public Library, The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, by some guy named Gallagher. There was an overdue notice with it. And then there were four notebooks with hand written stuff in them.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “His and a bunch of unidentified ones in the library book. On the notebooks, only his, except the techs found smudges on the covers and the upper right hand corner of some of the pages. Don’t know what that means.”

  Karl took the report from Billy and skimmed it. “It probably means someone wearing dirty gloves leafed through them. And here’s something else, all the books are numbered and book four has a half dozen pages in the back razored out.”

  “Who would do that?” Essie asked, enjoying the chance to be part of real police work for a change.

  “Either he did, or the killer did. My guess, he did. A killer would just rip them out,” Sam said.

  “Okay, Karl, you’re on the books. Sam, see what you can find out about Grotz and the Passaic library. Billy, I want you to go back out to the Lydell place and search that room from top to bottom. Check out Mrs. Winslow—that’s the daughter—with the neighbors, and get me the picture the ET’s took at the scene. Lydell says he sealed the room off from the rest of the house when he restored it, but there have been a slew of contractors working out there and anything is possible. Rap on the walls. Make sure they’re solid. Sometimes it’s easier to build a new wall in front of an old one that’s past replastering. If there’s enough space between the new one and the original, it’s possible to slip in between. Then, who knows? Anyway, look. There has to be a way in and out of that room with the door locked.”

  “Or to fire a shot into it with the door locked,” Karl added, catching Ike’s drift.

  “Got it.” Billy stood and the rest gathered themselves together.

  “One last thing. Try not to annoy Lydell any more than necessary. Essie, notify me the minute Mrs. Grotz arrives. That’s it.”

  Chapter 15

  Essie lingered as the others filed out. Ike glanced up from the report in front of him.

  “Okay, Essie. What can I do for you?”

  “Well…Okay, first, I need to ask if it would be okay to take some time off next week. Rita said she’d work an extra shift if she had to and Darcie Billingsly is pretty much up to speed as the on-call, and she’s good to work the eleven to seven when her kids are asleep. She has an old aunt that’s moved in with her since Whaite died and…”

  “Whoa. Stop. It’ll be okay. Sure. Where’re you going?”

  “I was figuring on going with my sister’s kids to Disney World. They got passes at work. But…”

  “But?”

  “I just sat here and listened to you all, and I’m just…wondering. You’re going to think this is pretty silly.”

  “Perhaps, but you won’t know until you say it.”

  “If I was to go to that police academy school, would you be interested in hiring me on as the deputy?”

  Ike gazed at Essie. She had been in the department as long as anyone, longer than most. Always cheerful, she’d become a fixture at the dispatch desk. He tried to visualize her as his deputy. He couldn’t. People frequently compared her to Dolly Parton with Dolly coming in a distant second. Put all that in a uniform…She was certainly smart enough. Was she tough enough? He sighed.

  “Tell you what, Essie, you go on down to Orlando with your nephews and nieces and give it a good think. The next class at the academy won’t start until June. There’s plenty of time between now and then to get you sponsored and enrolled.”

  “But if you keep Hedrick…Karl, there won’t be a place for me.”

  “Three things you need to know. First, deputies come and go. It’s a perilous, underpaid business. Men like Whaite, for instance, lose their lives in the line of duty and leave widows and kids behind. Some grow tired of the hours and the danger and find something easier to do. Second, you don’t know how you’ll react to the academy. Not everyone is cut out for this work and the training is designed to find that out. Finally, I haven’t asked Karl and I’m not convinced he’d say yes even if I did. He’s committed to his career at the Bureau. So, just stay on your course and see what happens.”

  Ike returned to the report. Essie hesitated.

  “Something else?”

  “Ike, you know I don’t like to gossip…”

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked, avoiding the opportunity to comment on that bit of off-the-mark self-assessment.

  “I came in this office before you did, you know.” He did. For the first weeks of his tenure, cronies of his predecessor had tried to make his job impossible. Only a clean sweep of most of the entrenched personnel had kept the sheriff’s office from becoming a war zone. Essie had flirted with the dissidents but had been won over. “Ike, they’re at it again.”

  “Who?”

  “The deputies you let go and some of the boys down at the feed store. The deputies signed on with a security firm up in Staunton. It’s gone out of business and now those guys want to fix it so you can’t operate and they get back to the way things were.”

  “Our late sheriff, Loyal Parker, can’t very well hire them back. He’s dead.”

  “Yeah, I know, but they’re saying you’re responsible for that on account of he’d be alive if you didn’t take his place.”

  “That makes no sense, Essie. What in the world are they thinking?”

  “I don’t know, but, like, I hear things. They want me to, you know, spy on you and then maybe help them plant some stuff that can be found by the State Police.”

  “You’re kidding. Who’re they?”

  “God’s truth, I wished I was. Like, have you noticed anything where it shouldn’t be lately?”

  Ike’s reputation for being disorganized was legendary. He had a sign over his cluttered desk that read,I’m not disorganized. I’m creative. The odds he’d notice anything out of place ran from slim to none.

  “Where? Lord, Essie, you know I don’t keep track of stuff.”

  “See, that’s what they’re counting on, like, what’s in your car?”

  “Um…” he tried to think about the cruiser. Did anything seem different, out of place? “Nothing…well, there were the coffee cups in the trunk. I don’t remember putting them in there. Come to think of it, I never put trash in the trunk of the car.”

  “Maybe you’d better check it.”

  “If what you’re telling me is straight, I’ll need a witness. You said you liked police work…okay, let us check it out.”

  He walked Essie to the car and popped the trunk. Th
e paper cups were scattered in untidy batches. He stared at them for a moment. Essie reached in to gather them up.

  “Don’t touch,” he snapped. “Sorry. Run in and get me a few of the big evidence bags. And a couple of small ones, too.”

  The two of them, latex gloved, picked up the cups and bagged them. Then Ike removed his spare clothes and emptied the pockets. He bagged three powder filled glycine envelopes and some slips of paper, which had what appeared to be phone numbers scrawled on them with area codes he did not recognize. He made sure Essie signed the tags next to his signature and then had Charlie Picket photograph the trunk and the interior of the car. He directed Charlie to take it, the cups, and papers to the county crime lab.

  “Okay, who?” he asked. Essie averted her eyes. “Essie, time to stand up. This town is changing and can’t go back to the days when the sheriff’s office was the enemy. Who?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but Daryll, down at the garage where the cars is worked on…he’s kin to George LeBrun. You remember him.”

  Ike did. LeBrun at one time served as second in charge, and acted as the former sheriff’s bag man.

  “Pull both their prints and send them along with the other stuff. If there’s anything going on and I can make a case, those bozos are going to jail.”

  Essie looked distressed.

  “Problem?”

  “They’ll know I was the one that ratted them out.”

  Ike hadn’t thought of that. “Tell you what. You pack your bags and get on down to Orlando. I’ll let the word leak out that I put you on disciplinary paid leave. That is partly true and it ought to make them look elsewhere. Essie, now you see how it is. Police work is messy and sometimes it gets dangerous. But if we don’t put the bad guys away, if we turn a blind eye because they might come back to hurt us, they win.”

  She nodded unhappily and walked back into the office with him. “I reckon you’re right. Whew.”

  Chapter 16

  Norbert’s Lock and Load sold a combination of security devices, surveillance equipment, and other marginally legal items, as well as guns and ammunition. Rumor had it that some of Norbert’s clientele traveled from as far away as Washington D.C. to browse through his inventory. When it came to selling hand guns, Norbert had acquired a reputation, which he vehemently denied, for being somewhat loose in his background checks. In any case, he remained a politically incorrect institution in the very shadows of Callend College, Picketsville’s major, and perhaps, only point of interest and bastion of correctness. Ike pulled into the gravel parking lot and waited a moment for Norbert to recognize him and make whatever adjustments he needed before welcoming the town’s law enforcement arm.