Death in Living Gray

by John Clayton

  “You’re divorced?”

  “Definitely. I threw him out when he retired from the military, changed back to my maiden name and moved into the parents’ old homeplace. They bought it cheap in the fifties. It went down and now it’s going back up with the renovations in the area.”

  She was a wandering conversationalist, so I pushed back to the subject—at least the subject that was foremost in my requirements. “All of the marked houses on your map were frame except for the Pickerill place. It’s brick.”

  “Oh, that was because of the owner. I was looking at this old white frame house on what looked like a pig farm out near the mountains. It really could have used some siding but there wasn’t anybody home. There was this young bicyclist riding by—had sort of a golden tan color and the strangest sky blue eyes. I asked him where the owners were, and he told me the owner was a Mr. Pickerill who lived in the brick house. I called, but this Mr. Pickerill was too cheap to save the old house. He said he’d pull it down first. All he was doing was renting the land.”

  Now all that made sense. The young fellow was Stuart, who loved to ride around out in that area. On what we Henry and I paid him he couldn’t afford a car. I wasn’t even sure he knew how to drive one.

  So I asked whether she had seen anybody else interesting and she said no except that Pickerill was so cheap that he probably stole the jewels himself. I explained that Mr. Pickerill was a leading citizen who had just donated a wing to the county hospital and was beyond reproach. I asked if her son-in-law had seen anything unusual, like somebody trying to sell a bunch of expensive bracelets.

  “You could have asked him yourself without coming all the way up here. He’s down at the old deMorgan estate in the southern part of the county, 1880 farmhouse, I think. Today he was supposed to do the Anderson place but we had to change the order. He’s probably spent three or four months working in Mason County, all told, this last year.”

  Damn Overhouse. It probably never occurred to him to check to see whether any of the people came back to Mason County for another visit.

  “But I doubt that he saw anything he could remember,” she added. “When he’s on the road he spends all his time away from work writing sentences that don’t connect and his time on the job trying to think up more.”

  It was a blind alley. Therefore I asked an irrelevant question which had been bursting forth. “Just how do you sell aluminum siding to the good ol’ boys?”

  She laughed showing off her buck teeth. “They think I’m one of them. I tell them my great-great-great-grandfather was aide-de-camp to General Pulaski at Yorktown. In fact, George Washington passed Cornwallis’s sword to him for safekeeping right after the surrender.”

  “Lord Cornwallis surrendered to General Benjamin Lincoln,” I pointed out.

  She looked startled and then laughed again. “You know that and I know that, but most Virginians don’t know that—so what’s the difference? Besides, I have an ancestor who froze his butt off with Napoleon at Moscow. That’s close enough.”

  I was beginning to enjoy her sense of humor and said that it was a shame that we hadn’t met before when she was down in Mason County.

  “Oh, I met you once, now that I think about it,” she said. “Don’t you remember? You were getting into a brown van at a used car lot when I stopped to ask for directions. There was this cutest man with a bow tie. Looked just like J. Edgar Hoover—that is, he would have if the late Director had ever worn a neat little mustache.”

  Now I didn’t know who should feel more insulted, Old Oilhead or J. Edgar.

  “He just turned me on. I was waiting for you to buy the van and leave so I could make a pass, but he gave you a kiss before you left, so I figured you two were having at it.” She pushed a little tray of Girl Scout cookies in my direction. “Why are all the good ones taken? All I seem to get is the dumb blondes, never the dark little ones—except, of course, for that Italian when my husband was stationed in Italy in the seventies. On the bus one day, he pinched me. I pinched him back and he looked so startled I bought him a spaghetti dinner. The affair ran on for two years. Fortunately, he couldn’t get an annulment, so I kept right on being married to What’s-His-Name just to get a piece of his retirement. But then I didn’t need it because I make more selling siding down in Virginia than he does on his retirement and that fancy military consulting job he got. So I let him have it all.”

  I was pretty miffed that somebody had seen me kissing Old Oilhead and further miffed that that someone thought he was cute. Damn, but she had the right spirit. “How would you like to help me play a practical joke down at the waterfront?” I asked.

  “Count me in,” she said, without a second’s hesitation.

  ***

  After switching to Bermudas and a tulle print sleeveless blouse, she called to Mary Ann, who was upstairs watching a video of Gone with the Wind, that we were off to the waterfront, and told her grandkids to behave themselves.

  “Too nice a day to drive. It’s only six blocks,” she said, as we set off walking along a tree-lined street dappled with splotches of sunlight. Over one shoulder, Emily was swinging a medium-sized bag of the kind that you might take to the beach. But it seemed mostly empty. I was about to ask about it when the story unfolded all by itself. At the small deli/tavern on the corner she bought a bottle of white wine, a California, a small box of plastic cups, and she negotiated for a couple of handfuls of ice cubes from behind the bar. “It’ll be afternoon soon,” she explained.

  We went straight down to the last street before the harbor and headed left toward the empty lot where Jack Senior had his car. Emily was greeting a lot of the residents by name and waving at the ones she didn’t know. “Bawmorons are the friendliest, most helpful people in the world,” she said, as we almost skipped along toward the waterfront.

  Suddenly I plunged down, scrunched between two parked cars. There, about half a block away, was Jack Senior escorting a tall, lean, white-haired woman toward a BMW M3 two-seater parked out by the curb. Third cousins? They could have been twins. She handed him the keys as he held the passenger side door for her to get in.

  I was working up to rushing out and confronting him at the driver’s side before he could get away. But I couldn’t because: one, he would know that I was the one who was going to play a practical joke on him, and two, Emily was holding on to my elbow.

  “Later,” she said.

  ***

  Jack Senior never locked his car—at fifteen years old, what was to steal, and it was a convertible anyway. Letting off the hand brake and giving a push would be pretty easy even with the steering wheel frozen in position. But we found that it was going to be hard to push it over the abutment dividing the parking lot from the water. It was only about one foot high but was big enough to stop any of the dozen or so cars scattered around the lot from accidentally being driven into the harbor.

  Emily pointed to a heap of old concrete blocks over next to the still-unrenovated warehouse at the edge of the lot. “A ramp,” she said.

  We trudged back and forth three times, bringing mostly broken pieces so we could build a sloping ramp back to each front wheel. If we could get the front going fast enough it would slither right over. The front wheels were pretty well lined up in the direction we wanted to go.

  After I let off the brake, we both got behind and gave a big push. The car advanced about two inches. We needed more distance to get it going, so we both went around to the front and pushed it back about fifteen feet until we were stopped by a big pothole marked off by two orange pylons. We couldn’t go back any further and keep the wheels lined up. After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, we pushed from behind and got it really rolling this time. And made it about six inches up the ramp.

  “No way,” said Emily. “It needs more power than we’ve got. I’ll go get my car.” And she was off trudging back in the direction of her house. While I waited for her, I scanned the harbor and its environs. Off toward the west, glowing in the late s
pring sunlight, was the Inner Harbor, where I could see water taxis ferrying tourists out to Fort McHenry. Closer in, I could see brick row houses, some of which incorporated small shops. Closer still were the waterfront condominiums with their private boat docks, owned by the super rich for weekend use. Even close, the area, in which I was standing, was waiting to be redeveloped. A road crew had arrived to fill in one of the potholes in the street running parallel to the harbor. They complemented the scenery but they were definitely unwanted observers for what we were going to do.

  Emily came rattling up in her country-sales-person’s Chevrolet Impala, pulling back and forth a few times so she could line up straight behind Jack Senior’s car in spite of the pothole. I pointed to the road crew, or rather the remaining road crew since it being about noon, apparently two of them had gone off to lunch, and the other one was eating a big hoagie while perched on the seat of his front-end loader. Emily just shook her head knowingly and gunned the engine.

  The Chrysler lurched forward. That is, it lurched until the front wheel went over the bulwark. Then the frame crunched down onto the concrete and no amount of force supplied by the Chevrolet’s revving engine could get it to budge.

  “Damn!” I said. “Not as good as in the harbor but at least it’ll give him pause for thought.”

  But Emily was undeterred. She pointed toward the remaining member of the work crew in the street, backed up the Impala, and drove the right front wheel into the pothole, smashing one of the orange pylons in the process.

  Before I could figure out what she was doing, she was out of the car and running over toward the front-end loader, waving her arms in front of the workman, who was in turn gesticulating back from his seat high on the machine. After about two minutes, the front-end loader came lumbering around the entranceway to the empty lot and rumbled up to the front of the Chevrolet. Emily was standing on a brace up next to the driver, a short man with a black-and-gray streaked ponytail held in place by a plaid kerchief that matched exactly his work shirt. She was pointing to the pothole.

  The driver gave a little nod, placed the bucket under the front bumper, and jumped off to see that it was correctly located under an internal strut. Giving a thumbs-up, he hopped back up and pulled a couple of levers. Emily stayed right up on the brace, watching as he raised the car up and moved it over about two feet so the wheel was on solid ground.

  Emily whispered something to the driver. He smiled, as the two of them jumped off and walked toward the car, Emily being careful to walk between him and the Chrysler, which was still hanging out over the harbor. “How about a little of that wine to celebrate?” she said to him. “You don’t know how much I appreciate this. It would have cost us a fortune to have a towing company do it.”

  Yeah, I was thinking. With what I’d seen of Emily, it would have been about five minutes with a jack and another five to fill in the hole with the same kind of rubble we had used on the ramp. But she didn’t lose a step. “Prudence, could you get a cup for the gentleman and share some of the California Sauterne we just bought?” She unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and waggled her head in my direction.

  I hesitated, wondering at first what she was up to, then deciding that so far she had been right on top of things. So, as I turned to get the wine from the front seat where we’d put it, I popped a button too. When I turned back with the bottle, I could see her hopping up onto the seat of the loader. One of my buttons probably wasn’t going to be enough, so I dropped the package of cups down behind the seat and managed to get the seat belt all tangled up around my head as I tried to get it out. Waving one arm behind my back, I motioned for the driver to hold the seat forward as I wiggled to get loose. He wedged his head in with me, pulling as I pushed, smelling of sweat and the damnedest aftershave lotion that I have ever run into. I would have asked him where he got it but his ponytail was in my face.

  When I was able to straighten back up, he helped by opening the carton and extending two cups in my direction. Over his shoulder, I could see the bucket of the loader with the tail of the Chrysler about head high as the car began to slide forward. Emily was sitting in the seat, shifting levers like a professional. A slight turn and he would have seen, so I poured the drink with a flick so it went down both our fronts. He whipped out a surprisingly clean white handkerchief, sponged his front, then handed the handkerchief to me—no politically correct rule books here. I took it with a little extra pressure on his hand to keep him from looking around, but it was a wasted effort because just then there was a big clang of grinding metal.

  The driver spun around just in time to see the Chrysler plunge into the harbor, along with about ten feet of the abutment that had been torn off by the force. The bucket was almost down to its normal rest position and Emily was sitting on the ground, half underneath the bucket, a look of pure stark terror on her normally sunny face. The workman, handing me his as yet unfilled cup, ran in the direction of the disaster muttering, “Damned Molly!”

  He ran at first toward the machine and then turned toward Emily, who was sliding on her butt, pushing herself with both feet away from the loader. Then, apparently deciding that the first priority was to prevent Molly from doing any further damage, he leapt into the driver’s seat, even though by now the machine was just sitting there puttering contentedly.

  Still clutching the wine cups, I stumbled along behind him, wondering what to do with the wine cups in my hands and what, if I figured that part out, I could do to help Emily. What if she had a broken back? Or internal injuries? Fortunately, before I could decide on a course of action, I was confronted by the sight of Emily climbing slowly to her feet—grinning at me from an angle that prevented the driver from seeing her. I felt a surge of pure relief—until, over her shoulder, I could see Jack Senior’s Chrysler sitting nose down in the harbor with just the rear bumper and one tail light showing. Then the tears began to well up. We’d had some fun in that car.

  As he jumped down from the loader, the driver had a real worried look on his face “Sorry you were frightened,” he said as he ran toward Emily. “Old Molly does that sometimes. Just starts off on her own. Need a new one but the city can’t afford it. That’s what they say, anyway.” He was reaching for his handkerchief, but I still had it in my hand, so I did the honors.

  Emily took it, adopting a very serious look. “Since you were helping me, I’ll take full responsibility,” she said, looking sideways at me with a don’t fink out and cry look.

  So I stuffed a sniffle and volunteered, “I think that old car that will bring more from the insurance than it’s worth,” as I handed a now completely filled cup to the driver. He slowly looked at it, and then Molly, and then the hole in the abutment—before taking a big gulp.

  “I think we should pretend it didn’t happen,” Emily said.

  The workman took another gulp, and looked up and down the street out front. Nobody seemed to be interested. Then he looked at the warehouses that were around the lot. There were no windows from any of them facing out onto the lot.

  “OK,” he said. “Nothing happened.”

  “Here’s my card, if there’s a problem.” Emily was handing him a card from the breast pocket of her blouse, which wasn’t yet rebuttoned. “I’m Emily Patowski. Live up on Pratt Street.”

  “And my name’s Norman Pettigrew. Pleased to meet ya.” He shook our hands, emptied the cup with one more gulp, swung up into the loader, and was jockeying out to the street repairs before we could get back to the car.” About ten feet away, he stopped and called out over the noise. “Can I call even if there isn’t a problem?”

  Emily gave a vigorous nod of her head while motioning me into the passenger’s seat. “Been lucky so far, don’t want to push it.”

  I agreed, as we pulled out into the street with Emily giving Norman a parting wave. “Meet men in the damnedest places,” she said. “Got this thing for dark little men with ponytails.”

  “Or little men that look like J. Edgar Hoover?” I laughed.


  Emily just gave me a grin and said, “True, but in this case I got a bunch of big old stones out in my back patio that I want to rearrange.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Past fifty you got to get your priorities straight,” she said. “—with maybe a few exceptions,” she added with another grin. And then she invited me to share a late lunch at a little joint down at Fells Point. I demurred, explaining I had lots to do back home, but probably the truth was that I was a little too hyper to eat. I thanked her for the information and the assistance. “You were pretty good with that piece of machinery.”

  “I love to do things like that. If my son-in-law didn’t need the money, I’d do the siding myself.”

  She let me off beside my car and said, “Let me know how it comes out—the murder and theft, I mean. I already know about the other.” She laughed. “You wouldn’t be getting back at him if you didn’t care about the SOB. Not like me and What’s-His-Name. Of course, if you get it settled, that’ll free up Clarence. Maybe I’ll stop by and ask for directions again.”

  I still didn’t tell her that I’d already dumped Old Oilhead.

  Chapter 6

  In the river?” I asked. “What river?” It was terse—but only a little condemning.

  “The Shenandoah, over near Front Royal.” Jack Senior answered, not allowing himself to be condemnable. “Apparently somebody stole it from Dulles and went for a joy ride. And to top it all off, old Richard Clarke didn’t know anything.”