The Diva Wore Diamonds

by Mark Schweizer

  I generally avoided church staff meetings as a rule. Thursday afternoons weren’t especially busy, but even so, the criminal element in St. Germaine certainly didn’t take Thursday afternoons off. That was my argument anyway. I suspected that, in reality, it did take Thursday afternoons off. Now, I was just hoping for some gunplay down at Noylene’s Beautifery to shake me loose—something that had been known to happen on occasion, especially when one of the new girls mixed up “Blue Rinse” with “Blue Wench,” apparently two distinctly different hair products.

  “How about getting a headhunter?” I said.

  “What’s that?” asked Marilyn. Besides Marilyn, the long-suffering secretary of St. Barnabas and the only one who truly knew what was going on, the meeting included Bev, Kimberly, Joyce Cooper, who had been in charge of the welcoming ministry for more than a few years, Georgia, and myself. Father Tony was always invited, of course, but hadn’t made a meeting yet.

  “You know, a headhunter,” I said again. “Someone to go out and find who we want, offer him or her a much better salary than he’s currently making, and spirit him into St. Germaine in the dead of night.”

  “Do you think that would work?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. Might be worth a try.”

  “I’ll run it past the vestry,” said Bev, jotting notes to herself. “I wonder if it’s at all ethical.”

  “I guess we could always ask the bishop for help,” said Joyce. That brought a laugh from everyone.

  “Ethical, schmethical,” said Georgia. “We need a priest!”

  “Number two,” said Bev. “Diamonds.” She threw up her hands. “Now we’re sitting on diamonds. What are we going to do about that?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” said Joyce. “and I suggest we draw up an amendment to our charter forbidding any digging for diamonds on church property.”

  “Can we do that?” asked Bev, looking at me.

  I thought for a moment. “It’s the right idea, but it would be easier just to restrict all the mineral rights to the property. Maybe put them in an irrevocable trust for, say, a hundred years.”

  “I’ll ask the lawyers about it,” said Bev, making another note.

  “Now, what about those kids?” Kimberly demanded, the ball finally falling into her court.

  “What kids are those, dear?” said Bev, sweetly.

  “Those little terrorists who tried to hijack my Bible Bazaar!”

  “Oh, they’re fine,” said Joyce, with a laugh. “Kids will be kids, after all. The important thing is to keep them busy.”

  “I agree,” said Georgia. “As long as they have something to do here at the church, it’s far less likely that we’ll have another incident like last summer.”

  Bev and Joyce nodded gravely.

  “What happened last summer?” asked Kimberly suspiciously.

  “Best you don’t know,” said Bev. “We’ve all tried very hard to put it behind us.”

  •••

  It was June, but cool enough to have a fire going in the fireplace and, if there was a fire (and there was), Baxter would be lying in front of it on his old rug. Meg was curled up on the couch. Archimedes was preening himself atop the head of my stuffed buffalo, a present from Meg some years back that she had procured from some Western-style eatery going out of business. I was feeling pretty smug about the whole set-up.

  “Maybe you could start a children’s choir,” suggested Meg. She’d finished her biography and was now reading The Shack.

  “Maybe not,” I said, feeling a cold chill creep up my neck. I flipped on the light over my typewriter and stuck Raymond Chandler’s fedora firmly on my head.

  “I think you should read this book when I’m finished with it. You’d like it.”

  “Doesn’t matter if I’d like it or not,” I said. “I won’t read it. It’s too popular. Maybe in a few years.” I rolled a new sheet of paper into the old machine.

  “You are so odd,” said Meg, looking at me with a smile. “What’s on the stereo? I really like it. It’s beautiful.”

  “That’s the soundtrack from the film A River Runs Through It.”

  “That’s why I like it. I loved that movie. You know,” she said, “maybe all the good composers have turned to film. That’s why I can’t listen to the academics.”

  “No doubt about it,” I said.

  “Who’s the composer?”

  “Fellow named Mark Isham.”

  •••

  Wiggy went by the title of “pastor,” though his ordination was obtained on the World-Wide Interweb for the cost of five dollars. Pastor Wiggy Newland. It had a ring to it, the kind of ring that cash registers made when old ladies sent in their Social Security checks to Pastor Wiggy’s tax-exempt address in Weehauken, Wisconsin. Of course, Wiggy would no longer be going by the title of “pastor.” Now he had a new name. Mort.

  •••

  I read over the page and smiled to myself. No doubt about it. The hat and the typewriter were working their magic.

  “Erich Korngold was the first classical guy to make a big name for himself as a film composer,” I said. “Captain Blood, Sea Wolf, The Adventures of Robin Hood and a lot of others.”

  “Hmm,” said Meg, changing the subject. “You know, if you started a children’s choir, it would give those kids an appreciation of music that would last the rest of their lives.”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “Who put you up to this?”

  Meg suddenly looked very guilty. “Well…someone brought it up at the vestry meeting. I’m not saying who.”

  “Bev? Elaine? Kimberly Walnut?”

  “I told you, I’m not saying.”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Look,” said Meg. “It would be a good thing. Just for the summer. Then you can quit.”

  “Nope.” I looked back at my typewriter, knowing that I was doomed.

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” Meg said.

  “Oh, man!” I whined.

  Meg walked up behind me and whispered something delicious in my ear.

  “Okay, fine!” I grumbled, half-heartedly. “But I’m picking the music.”

  •••

  I needed to talk to Pedro. He was right where I thought he’d be, decorating our regular table at Buxtehooters with cigar butts and empty shot glasses. Pedro LaFleur was my right-hand man, big as a really big bear and cranky as a ten-pound baby with a twelve-pound diaper. He sang counter-tenor for the Presbyterians in his spare time or whenever Orlando Gibbons showed up in the anthem rotation, but mostly he was a heck of a gumshoe. He also drank like a fish, the kind of fish that consumes huge quantities of scotch and passes out on the beach.

  “Did you know the dead guy?” I asked. “Wiggy Newland?”

  “No, but I did some checking,” said Pedro. “According to my snitch, he’s been in dutch ever since he was belched out of his mother’s angry, belligerent womb. He was sent to baby-juvie when he was three, regular-juvie when he was eight, and didn’t come out until he was pardoned by the archbishop for arranging to sell indulgences to Southern Baptists who thought they were buying Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free cards. After that, he went full-time into the ministry scam.”

  “Anything else?”

  Pedro sat back in his chair.

  “He’s been dealing diamonds.”

  “You know where he was getting them?”

  “I know where. Just not how. I do know that Picket the Fence was funding his retirement plan. There’s also a skirt involved.”

  “Constance Noring?”

  “That’s the one. They’d been making Bible-study trips to Australia every three months.”

  “They take a missionary position?”

  Pedro snorted. “Not if I know Constance.”

  I nodded knowingly.

  “I doubt that the diamond mines of Humptydoo are the new mission fields,” he continued. “They’re smugglers.”

  “So the church gig was a front.”

  “It brought in
a pretty penny, no doubt,” said Pedro, “but it was a laundering operation.”

  Pedro was seldom wrong. He had a sense about these things, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

  “You know where the money was going?”

  “Workin’ on it. Why don’t you give Twelve-Fingered Teddy a rattle? He might know something.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Chapter 11

  “Okay, it’s been a week. What have we got?” I asked, as I banged into the police station.

  “We’ve got donuts,” offered Dave.

  “We’ve got some leftover coffee from yesterday,” said Nancy. “Other than that, we’ve got zilch.”

  Nancy’s motorcycle helmet was resting on the counter, holding down a stack of papers. Nancy was a motorcycle cop in the summer, having outfitted her Harley with a couple of blinking blue lights. In the winter, she tooled around in her old Nissan sedan and longed for summer. She moved her helmet and rifled through the papers.

  “Nothing from the lab. No fingerprints on the rock, and the only DNA samples they could get were from the victim. Blood, hair and a little bit of tissue. All from Russ Stafford. The rock weighed in at thirty-four pounds.”

  “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” I said.

  Nancy and Dave both nodded. Dave offered me the box of donuts.

  “Sorry, Chief,” said Dave. “I ate all the jelly ones.”

  I made the kind of executive decision for which I was famous and went with powdered sugar. “So,” I said, “what we need is a confession.”

  “That’d be good,” said Nancy. “Shall I get the rubber hoses?”

  “Not yet,” I said with a smile. “We need to know who we’re dealing with first. Go and get the names of the adults who were there from New Fellowship Baptist.”

  “We’re presuming that it wasn’t a kid who killed him?” asked Dave.

  “For now,” I said. “I’m thinking a kid would have left a print or some DNA or something. This was planned.”

  “Okay,” said Nancy. “That Walnut woman gave me a list of everyone who was signed up to work. I’ll narrow it down to the adults from the Baptist church.”

  “It’s a start,” I said. “We’ll look for motive and work backwards. How many people knew that the last skit was The Stoning of Stephen?”

  “Everyone,” said Nancy. “The schedule was posted in everyone’s tent and on the bulletin board they set up beside the drama area.”

  I walked around the counter and back to my cluttered office, dropped into my chair behind the desk, and pushed some paperwork off to the side. Most of our paperwork concerned filling out state forms. Whatever Dave couldn’t manage, he’d leave on my desk. I’d get to it.

  “Let’s have a list,” I called.

  Nancy and Dave both appeared at the door.

  “Other than the Baptists?” Nancy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She pulled out her pad and read.

  “Ardine, Bud and Pauli Girl McCollough, Noylene Fabergé-Dupont, Hogmanay McTavish—aka Brother Hog—and maybe Brianna Stafford.”

  “Scratch Brother Hog,” I said. “He wasn’t there, and he’s so fat someone would have recognized him.”

  Nancy put a line through his name.

  “How about Ardine?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not her style. She’s more of a poisoner.”

  In addition to her ex-husband PeeDee, a nasty, abusive piece of work who had mysteriously gone missing many years ago, Ardine had been involved in another case, the murder of one Willie Boyd. Mr. Boyd had been dispatched by one of the oldest and revered techniques in the hills for ending an unhappy marriage: oleander poisoning. Before divorces became easily obtained, it was very difficult for a woman in these hills to rid herself of an abusive or unfaithful husband, and a cup of oleander tea solved the problem. The heart attack that followed was rarely diagnosed, since life expectancy up here in the hills wasn’t that great to begin with. After the law changed and a woman could file for divorce herself, the mortality rate of married males, aged twenty to fifty, went down sixty percent. Mr. Boyd wasn’t married to Ardine, but he was pretending that he was and blackmailing her for favors unbecoming a lady. I couldn’t prove any of this, of course, so it was all just conjecture on my part. Ardine hadn’t denied it, but she hadn’t admitted to it, either. No charges were ever filed.

  “She could have done it,” Nancy said. She and Dave knew all about Willie Boyd.

  “Yeah, she could have,” I agreed. “I’ll go talk to her. Pauli Girl, too.”

  “Okay,” said Nancy. “I’ll put together that list.”

  •••

  St. Germaine was in full bloom. I walked out of the police station and looked across Sterling Park, thought about cutting across, but decided to meander around the square and do my police-chief-checking-on-the-town thing à la Andy Griffith. St. Germaine had a lot going for it these days; principally, a lovely downtown, thanks to a mayor who, in 1961, made it a crime to cut down any healthy mature tree in the historic district under penalty of a $1000 fine—quite a bit of money back then. The result of this ordinance was that, since new construction generally required clearing some land, most business owners chose to remain downtown in their old buildings and refurbish them rather than move to a newer and less picturesque site. There were a few businesses that bucked this trend, the Piggly Wiggly Grocery Store, for example, but they had to pay the City Council a pretty penny for the privilege. The likeness of this “man of foresight and wisdom,” as the plaque read, now stood in the center of the park named after him—Harrison Sterling.

  Most of the stores and offices located on the square were decorated with flower boxes or planters containing every blossom from ageratums to zinnias. My old Chevy truck was parked in front of the station, and, as I walked by, I opened the driver’s side door and rooted around under the seat until I found my cell phone. It was dead, of course, having been under the seat for the better part of a week, but I had promised Meg I’d find it and do my level best to hang onto it. During the winter, my phone worked just fine, and I carried it all the time. The problem was that as soon as all the leaves came out, my phone only worked sporadically, and even then it seemed as if I had to be standing on one foot in the middle of the park to get any reception. The mice living under the seat of my truck hadn’t chewed it up too badly, at least as far as I could tell.

  The square was bustling. I walked down the sidewalk, greeting visitors and residents alike, and turned left at the corner. I waved through the window of Eden Books at Georgia, who was busily checking customers out behind the register, then continued on my trek. I passed Noylene’s Beautifery (closed until eleven) and saw Wormy getting out of his truck by the side dumpster.

  “Morning, Wormy!” I called. “Care to join me for a cup of joe?”

  “No, thanks,” he called back with a grin. “I gotta get back to work. I think I’ve got the whereabouts of that cave narrowed down.”

  He lifted an old box out of the back of his pick-up and tossed it into the dumpster.

  “Noylene says I can’t throw this stuff down the mountain anymore,” he said, a little disgust evident in his voice. “She says I have to bring it all into town. I offered to burn it, but she said no.”

  “Probably for the best,” I agreed.

  “Bah,” said Wormy. “It’s only rags and stuff left over from that Bible show.”

  “Look on the bright side, Wormy,” I said. “Now you’re an environmentalist. You can put that on your business cards for Wormy Acres.”

  He bucked up immediately. “Yeah! Hey, yeah! That’s a great idea! I’ll go tell Noylene!”

  I crossed North Main Street and stopped in at The Ginger Cat a couple of doors down. Annie Cooke, the owner, was behind the counter. Her establishment was full of shoppers, happy to take a break from their labors with a cup of tea, a scone and some homemade preserves.

  “Morning, Annie,” I said.
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  “Morning. What can I get you?”

  “Large coffee to go.”

  “How about some Mexican Altura Coatepec?”

  “If that’s coffee, I’ll take it.”

  The Ginger Cat was an upscale yuppie eatery and coffee house that offered sandwiches on fancy foreign breads, generally unpronounceable coffees, and knickknacks by mountain artisans. They also had a selection of local wines for which Bud had written enticing reviews. I put my three dollars on the counter, bid Annie adieu, took my cup, and walked back out into the morning.

  The Bear and Brew was going back up. Francis had settled with the insurance company almost immediately upon Russ’ demise and started rebuilding. I thought for a moment about Francis and discarded his motive almost immediately. If the church had lost the suit that Russ had filed, New Fellowship Baptist would have had to cough up much more than the insurance company would have to pay out. Added to that, Brianna Stafford still owned sixty percent of the business. If the church had won the lawsuit, the insurance company still would have paid. It was win-win for the Bear and Brew. No reason that I could see for the junior partner to kill the senior partner.

  I took a sip of coffee, headed toward the next corner, turned left again and followed the sidewalk toward St. Barnabas. I thought about anyone else who might have had a motive to kill Russ Stafford, but came up empty. I passed the gazebo in Sterling Park, a white, Victorian-looking structure left over from when St. Germaine had a community band that played concerts once a month during the summer. There was always talk of bringing the concerts back, a return to the days of yesteryear, but it hadn’t happened yet. I waved at some kids who were using the gazebo as a base for their game of tag.

  Billy was outside the church weed-eating the edge of the sidewalk. He had on a pair of ear-protectors as well as his goggles. I gave him a wave as I walked by, and he returned it with with a smile. Just past the church, I turned left, stopped into the flower shop and ordered a dozen roses for Meg. Red roses.