The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery)

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  “Yes,” I said. It came out choked, like I was talking around tears again. But really, it was the first time since the craft store that I hadn’t felt like crying.

  She hugged me. “OK,” she said. “We’ll figure out something.” And Lance and I were off again in a race to the center.

  “He could have done it, Lance,” I said, as we barreled along the same stretch of road for the third time in a day. I meant Alex, and Lance didn’t waste time pretending otherwise.

  “Could have,” Lance said. “But I don’t think so.”

  I began listing the strikes against Alex. “We have no idea when anybody decided Art was really missing in relation to when he left. Alex might have had time to . . .”

  Lance interrupted me with a shake of his head. “I don’t think so,” he said yet again. “It’s not the timing. I’m with you there. But he’s . . . he’s not the same person we used to know, Noel. He’s changed. Really changed.” The truck wasn’t eating up the road like it had been on our last trip this way, but I was still amazed we didn’t find ourselves ticketed. Lance went on, “You’ll have to see him before you really believe me. But that’s not why I think he’s innocent.”

  “What, then?” I tried to remember if I’d ever heard Lance actually defend his brother before. Ever. They hadn’t formally split until Alex battered me to within an inch of my life, but I didn’t think they were close before then. Other than the diminutive “Bub,” Lance had never showed any affection for Alex that I could remember, nor had Alex for Lance.

  Now, he cleared his throat. “The reason isn’t a good thing.” He spoke slowly, crafting his thoughts before each word. This was how Lance talked when he was working through a puzzle. Crosswords and primate research alike received this treatment. It irked me for Alex to get that same level of respect. Then Lance said, “Let’s go about it this way. When did your dad’s first credit card go missing?”

  “What has that got to do with your brother?”

  “Work with me here,” Lance said.

  “OK.” I tried to clear my mind and think, but it was nearly impossible. Finally, I said, “Months ago, I think.”

  “It happened once, months ago. I mean recently.”

  “Then I don’t know. And I don’t see why it matters.”

  “I think,” he said, “and in retrospect I should have seen it, that it was the Friday after we picked up Mom from the airport and brought her to dinner at your folks’ place. Right before your first dress fitting.” He gave that a minute to sink in. “I’m pretty sure the excess charges started that night.”

  “Lance, what are you telling me?”

  He took a deep breath and said, “My mother has been stealing your father’s cards. Every time she sees him. And then she’s been taking your car and driving into Columbus to run them up.”

  “She has not!” I said. “Her friends have been shuttling her. She’s only taken my car on one trip when I begged her to get my oil changed because I’m past due. That’s exactly the kind of ridiculous accusation Alex would make. I think he made this whole thing up, and the part about her wanting to wreck the house, too.”

  “Noel, she admits it,” Lance told me.

  “Of course she does,” I snapped. “She’s backing up her . . .”

  “No!” he interrupted me. “She denied it until Alex showed me the odometer and the shopping bags. Unless the techs at the lube shop botched the distance to the next oil change, she’s put close to three hundred fifty miles on the car she’s claimed she wasn’t driving. And the whole guest room closet is full of what she’s bought.”

  I sank back against the seat, flabbergasted. “So your mother has been stealing my father’s credit cards to do what? Why?”

  Lance said, “Anything at all to drive the wedge. Anything at all.”

  “She really hates me that much?” I asked.

  Lance said, “I don’t know if it’s directed at you, or if she’s gone back around the crazy bend. Do you know what she bought?”

  “No,” I said. “What? At this point, I don’t think anything would surprise me.” Mama had confided in me that there were, between the four cards, close to five thousand dollars in unauthorized charges.

  “Casserole dishes.”

  “And what else?”

  “Nothing else,” he said. “Two hundred ninety-two casserole dishes. I had to count them.”

  It was the final thing my brain couldn’t process that day. Marriage licenses, centerpieces, Art’s death, and my future mother-in-law plotting against me with casseroles. “My God, Lance. I wish I’d known this earlier. We could have floated some damned votives in those and skipped the whole centerpiece shopping trip.” And then we both laughed so hard that Lance had to pull over to the side of the road with tears streaming down his face.

  “OK,” I finally said. “But how does that exonerate Alex? I will concede that she might have him distracted, but he’s the only person I know capable of the kind of violence it would take to . . . to . . .” My hysterical laughter threatened to turn ugly again, as my mind flashed to Art’s ruined face.

  “It doesn’t,” Lance agreed. “Not entirely. But it makes me think we’re still looking for someone. He didn’t even stay at the center long enough for us to have gone out and returned. And I’ve got that from Trudy and Darnell both. He stayed for an hour, slogged around a couple of buckets, and left. He wanted to tell me about Mom in person, but he didn’t dare leave her alone for much longer than that.”

  “That’s what he says.” I wasn’t letting the man who had nearly killed me off the hook so easily.

  “It’s what he says, and I believe him,” Lance told me. “We need to see the security video.”

  Now that was something we could agree on.

  It was heading on toward sunset on the most insane, horrible day ever when Lance and I arrived once more at the Midwest Primate Sanctuary. Even the sign out front brought Art to mind. He had envisioned interconnected sanctuaries, not merely accredited affiliated institutions, but a nationwide primate rescue network. Midwest Primates was supposed to be the first, with five others to follow around the country. I didn’t know if his dream would ever come to fruition now.

  But we had other worries, like the police car drawn up across the lane, and the large sheriff’s deputy standing outside the car, barring our entrance.

  Lance pulled in, and the deputy was beside the truck before we could even open our doors. “Need to see some ID, folks,” he said. Someone had clearly prepared him for our arrival, because we didn’t get “Move along.” Fumbling for my wallet, I produced the envelope with the marriage license instead, and handed it to Lance so I could root deeper in my purse. The cop whistled and I looked up.

  Lance had handed the envelope to the officer, who, naturally enough, had opened it. “Oh for pity’s sake.” I leaned across Lance to pluck back the marriage license and hand the man my driver’s license instead. “Why’d you give him that?” I asked Lance.

  “You handed it to me,” Lance protested.

  “To hold so it wouldn’t get messed up while I dug around in here.”

  “Sorry.”

  The cop said, “When’s the wedding?” as he studied my driver’s license and, apparently finding my own features similar enough to those of the woman in the picture, returned it.

  “Tomorrow,” I muttered. Not that it’s any of your business. And don’t you dare ask me if the deceased was going to be the best man. But why would he ask that? Of course he wouldn’t. It was my own mind playing with my soul.

  “Good luck,” he said. “Be careful going back there. Drive slowly. Critters run right across that lane.”

  As if we didn’t know already. “Thanks.”

  We had to get through another roadblock at our gate. “Keep your eye out for that monkey. It’s out there hollering in the trees now. We’re trying to get a mess of dogs in to take care of it.”

  “You’re what? It’s . . .” Lance began.

  “First of all, o
rangutans aren’t monkeys,” I interrupted him. “And second, you aren’t bringing a bunch of dogs onto this property without . . .” Without what?

  “A warrant!” Lance, the lover of crime shows, finished for me.

  The deputy shrugged. “Just don’t get killed.”

  In the barn, we found a sheriff’s detective camped out in a folding chair, guarding Art’s office. He had interviewed our volunteers, and after they delivered lunch to the enclosures, he had sent them all home. Only Trudy and Darnell remained, at their own insistence because Lance had largely put them in charge and because the police seemed to think our apes and monkeys were getting ready to swarm out of their cages at any moment.

  “This one’s over my head, folks,” the detective, Andrew Carmichael, said to Lance’s question about gaining access to Art’s office. “That computer is part of a chain of evidence. At this point, I’m trying to secure the scene.”

  “What about dogs? The deputy out front said . . .”

  The detective shook his head. “Garret’s terrified of the mosquitoes. Nobody’s said anything about dogs to me.”

  I felt some measure of relief, but on the topic of Art’s office, he was polite but firm. We couldn’t get anything out, and the places we could go on our own property were limited. It didn’t help that in addition to all of the day’s sounds and images floating through my mind, the theme from The Andy Griffith Show had started whistling around in my head as soon as Carmichael introduced himself. His pale brown police hat evoked the program for me, even though Andrew Carmichael was black. “What about the orangutan?” I asked. Lance added his explanation about primates’ tool use, orangutans’ in particular.

  Detective Carmichael said, “There’s a couple of things you aren’t considering. First of all, I know Miss Trudy. Love her to death, but she’s too quick to jump to conclusions from what she hears on our squawk boxes. We don’t know or not know about a murder weapon until anything we might have found has been analyzed and compared with your friend’s skin and clothing.” At least he didn’t call Art “the victim.” At the hospital, Art’s name had almost immediately been subsumed under this new identity as “the victim.” “Your friend” was much gentler.

  “And from what little your people have told me, the animal could have killed your friend with its bare hands. Is that right?”

  I nodded mutely, flashing back to this morning when the big ape smacked Art so casually across the road. Lance said, “Could have, but . . .”

  Detective Carmichael went on. “So what if your friend tried to defend himself with a club? If there was a club, what if it had the ape’s blood on it?”

  “But he said it tried to save him,” I protested.

  “I hear you,” Carmichael told me. “I’m trying to get you to see this through my lens. I know this is hard for you. But I’m not doing my job if I don’t follow up on every single possibility. And right now, my best suspect is a pie-faced redhead who should really turn himself in for questioning.”

  The detective’s attempt at humor fell flat. Lance said, “It can’t do that if you shoot it on sight.”

  “No,” Carmichael said. “But it also can’t kill one of my officers or one of your people. Safety has to come first.”

  Lance started to argue something else, but an idea struck me. I said, “So, ‘shoot’ could have a pretty broad interpretation, right?”

  “What do you mean?” Carmichael asked.

  I said, “If we could arm your people with dart guns, they could neutralize it with one of those. There’s no reason ‘shoot on sight’ has to mean ‘kill on sight,’ right? We’re not advocating letting the thing run wild. It’s in our best interests to see the orangutan contained.”

  “Wait a minute.” The detective pulled out his cell phone, talked for a few minutes, then nodded, hanging up. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s ultimately going to be my supervisor’s call. He’ll be back up to the barn pretty soon for you to ask him yourself.”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t control that, much as I wanted to. When the animals were set loose from the private zoo in Michigan (and many of them wandered into Ohio), police had slaughtered them. Nearly fifty animals murdered because of a shoot-on-sight attitude. Lives lost because the police didn’t know how to contain the animals appropriately. About time they got an education.

  Lance said, “Noel, we’ve only got two dart guns.”

  “It’s enough to start out with,” I told him. “Damn shame if Art’s orangutan died on our watch.”

  Somewhat reluctantly, Detective Carmichael let us into our own office, watching carefully while I looked up home numbers to beg help from the zookeepers I knew at the Ohio Zoo and elsewhere in the state. All four of them were willing to collect and deliver the dart guns in person. The mass execution of exotics saddened them as deeply as it did us. Our friends at the Ohio Zoo were particularly rent by the affair, since they and their staff had been scrambling to lure and contain the animals while the situation unfolded along the state border. But a scant six of the creatures freed into the wild had been rescued. They wanted to help us save the orangutan here. The others were equally passionate, but they were further away, both emotionally and physically. Still, they were coming.

  They were coming, and I needed only to wait.

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  At last, I had done something, and some of my feelings of helplessness faded. Now I could turn my attention to the animals we were already responsible for. Random officers posted in and around the enclosure area had our primates in a high state of excitement, and I could hear the racket inside the whole time I was making my calls. I wanted to get out there as soon as possible to minimize disruptions to their lives.

  Lance booted up his computer.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “Getting the security videos,” Lance said.

  “Excuse me?” That was Detective Carmichael, eavesdropping on the conversation.

  “I’m not planning to fool around in anybody’s crime scene,” Lance said. “The videos back up to Art’s computer and to ours. You are welcome to sit down and join us watching.” Lance braced himself in front of the machine, arms crossed like he thought he could actually stop the detective, or like he thought our computer wasn’t now in the officer’s provenance.

  Carmichael seemed momentarily nonplussed. Trudy had, after all, and with our permission, given the police full control here. Detective Carmichael was, by his own description, the junior detective of two. The senior detective was still out on the grounds, at the place they had found by following Art’s bloody trail back into the forest. Carmichael was up here to babysit us. He hadn’t chosen the duty, but he was doing his best. Everybody else had been following his instructions pretty much to the letter. Our obstinacy clearly puzzled him.

  For my part, while I didn’t want the police disrupting our animals or, God forbid, shooting one, I wanted them here. We were all aware that whoever hurt Art might still be out in the woods. I scolded myself mentally for minimizing the violence. Art hadn’t been hurt. He’d been killed. But I shied away from that knowledge to concentrate on the thing that had set me off on this train of thought. The police might believe he’d been attacked by an orangutan, but we knew he had not. There would no doubt be search warrants and the like to allow the cops full access in the future, and even if not, we wanted them here, and we needed to cooperate with them.

  That was why we had agreed with Trudy’s willingness to give them full run of the place, even more than they would have needed. Even when Art was still alive. Maybe alive. Probably not. As I fished around in my mind to escape the cycle of Art’s death and find a tactful way to tell Lance to back off and let the detective do his job, a human voice rose above the ape and monkey chatter out back. “Hey, give that back.”

  Detective Carmichael groaned. “Not again,” he muttered.

  Instead of arguing with the man about our enclosures and office, his crime scene, and the boundaries of b
oth, I jumped out of my chair. “Excuse me,” I said, and brushed past him to find out what was wrong, Lance close on my heels.

  Even from the top of the hill where we were, I could see the spider monkeys were at it again. They had a hat, and the unnerved officer to whom it belonged was standing under their cage, shouting. Trudy, who was already standing at the barn door looking down on things, groused, “I told him not to stand so close.” Seeing us, she said, “Let me take care of it.”

  I said, “This one probably needs a team approach.” She had been taking on the police as if they were her responsibility entirely, simply because she used to work dispatch, and I didn’t think this fair to her. So I followed her down the hill, along with the detective. Behind us, Lance faded back into the barn.

  The young cop should have been more wary, given that Trudy had already rescued a service weapon from this group of troublemakers. But he was, as Carmichael confirmed in the string of curses that followed us down the hill, a damned rookie. And maybe the young man thought he was far enough away from the spider monkeys. If so, he was wrong. He probably didn’t even feel the tickly little tail encroaching on his head. I certainly hadn’t felt the one that stole my shirt and exposed Alex’s abuse so graphically to Lance.

  We had to dodge yellow crime-scene tape and walk beside, rather than on, the worn footpath in the grass, as the police had carefully marked off Art’s trail. I found it hard to ignore the visceral reminder of his absence, so I focused instead on the rookie deputy engaged in a battle of wills with an animal more cunning and stubborn than he could have imagined.

  “Hey!” the officer shouted again.

  “You’re upsetting them. You’ll make it worse,” Trudy yelled. It was doubtful he heard her over the din.

  The officer jumped up and made a swipe at the air, trying to retrieve his cap, but it was already miles above his head. He looked like a little kid in the middle of a game of keep-away. “Calm down!” Trudy called. “They’ll never give it back if they know you want it.”