Death in Living Gray

by John Clayton

  Henry explained that my mother had died and left me a little box I couldn’t manage to open.

  Sambo nodded, took the box from me, and invited us all into a wing at the right of the house—his office.

  It was a large open area with bits and pieces of locks and safes lying around in apparent disarray. But the walls held neat rows of various tools, many of which seemed to be for reaching into odd-shaped nooks and crannies, and some of which could properly have graced the offices of a berserk gynecologist.

  As he put the box down on his outsize workbench, there appeared at the doorway into the main house, a tiny dark-haired woman—she, at least, justified the last name Short even if it was by marriage. In one hand she had a tray with coffee, cups, and saucers, and in the other, a plate of hot buttermilk biscuits surrounded with little jars of damson preserves, blackberry jam, and real butter.

  She passed the tray around and joined Henry and me on high stools at the empty side of the workbench. Sambo sat opposite us and explained with a laugh, “The food’s to entertain my customers while I’m trying to figure out how to open their wallets.”

  I nibbled a biscuit as I watched Sambo hold the box up to the light and then shake it a little.

  Then he pushed and pulled on the top. “No sense wasting time opening it if it’s already open,” he said

  I was about to explain that we were in a hurry, when Henry interceded with a shake of his head and handed me the plate of biscuits. “Have another,” he said.

  And I did, just finishing the buttering as Sambo spun the last combination wheel and the top of the box popped right opened.

  Elvira clapped her hands.

  I looked at Henry, who nodded this time. So I clapped too, and said, “That’s the most amazing thing I ever saw.”

  “Best part of being skinny,” Sambo said. “No flesh to interfere with the nerve endings.”

  Henry explained that Sambo was on retainer to a lot of big companies who paid his fare from Dulles Airport to places all over the world.

  Sambo wrote down the number of the combination lock, so that I wouldn’t forget it in the future. He handed me the box without looking at the contents.

  Opening it carefully, I found four little red hardbound loose-leaf notebooks. Quickly scanning the first book, I saw a lot of dates and initials lined up in neat little columns. It looked sort of like my poor departed mother was a bookie. So I looked up at Sambo and smiled noncommittally.

  And Sambo smiled back, perusing me slowly and said, “I’m sorry to hear about your mother. California is a long way to go for a funeral.”

  I looked around at Henry. I didn’t know about Sambo but he knew all about my mother living in California. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t broadcast everywhere.

  Before Henry could say anything, Elvira explained. “Oh, just because we don’t go out in public much, it doesn’t mean that we don’t know what’s going on. Henry loves to come out and gossip. And I love people. It’s just that I can’t stand being in really crowded places.

  Henry leaned back and chuckled, “In fact, you’ve seen them every year out in not- so-crowded public.”

  I looked at him.

  “Robert E. Lee’s horse,” Elvira said. “Traveler.”

  I’m afraid my mouth jumped open. I remembered then, but it had never registered. “I thought it was some neighborhood kids,” I said, looking at Henry. Every year when he plays General Lee, he ties up a costume horse to the rail out in the front of the Pickerill place.

  “It’s always us, sittin’ outside, sipping martinis and watching the people go in and out,” Elvira explained, passing me the tray of biscuits.

  But I really did have to run before they got into a gossiping or reminiscing contest. Old Oilhead might come home at any time for more Vitamin C. And decide to stay this time. So I pulled out my wallet.

  Sambo moved his hand crosswise in a negative motion.” It was just a little job and Henry taught me to use a cutting torch nigh on to twenty years ago—for the big ones where finesse doesn’t work. I’m still trying to pay him off.”

  So Henry and I got up and headed through the door, with me still clutching the half-closed box.

  “Besides, we don’t think you did it,” Elvira called, waving from the door as we slithered through the drizzle toward Henry’s truck.

  ***

  When we got back to the state road, Henry stopped suddenly to let one of those four-wheel off-road motorcycle-type vehicles go roaring by, sloshing mud all over the truck. By the time the windshield washers had done their work, and Henry was ready to pull out again, a pickup redid the honors as it went flying by in full pursuit. Weevil Tuttle chasing a teenage malefactor. It was Tuesday and he was back on the job.

  ***

  “Do we need a witness?” I asked.

  “Why?” Henry asked in return.

  We’d pulled off the road in a little byway next to the creek where the local fishermen generally parked their cars.

  “In case we find something incriminating. You know, to testify as an expert witness.”

  “Witness to what? Burglary and breaking into a man’s lockbox?” Henry was waiting patiently for me to open the box. “This is only reconnaissance. If he’s stolen the jewels, you’ll have to find some legal way to get him.”

  “Oh,” I said. I knew that but I hadn’t thought far enough for it to be relevant. Well, on with the illegal reconnaissance. I popped open the box and removed the loose-leaf books, four of them, each about three inches wide and five inches high, with closely spaced lines. There was a date range on the cover page of each: the first 1990-1999, the second 1980-1989, the third 1970-1979, and the last 1964-1970. Each was about half full of notations except the first, which, as it was only a partial decade, was a little shorter.

  I handed the second one to Henry and looked at the first. It was full of dates and initials. I looked a little closer. The first column was in groups of two or three letters followed by an occasional number, spaced two groups to a page with eleven lines separating them. They were in alphabetical order by the first letter in the form a, bc where a appeared to stand for a last name and the bc for one or two initials. The extra number served to distinguish groups that had the same letters. Some pages had only one entry, indicating, I surmised, that Old Oilhead had inserted new entries on a separate page, still keeping them in rough alphabetic order. Must have been his clients.

  The second column had a seven-digit number with a dash after the first three. Obviously the telephone number. Then there was a date, most of which were January 1, 1990, but the others ran the gamut of possible dates in the decade. The fourth column was another date column that was filled in only about 10 percent of the time but sometimes up to ten numbers were listed in the column. Must be some record of actual transactions. The last column was another date column, but only a few entries had been made.

  I glanced through the last two volumes. They were more of the same.

  “The initials are his betting clients with their phone numbers, the dates are when a bet was made, and the last date is the time that they were paid off,” I suggested, glancing up at Henry, who was still on the first part of his book.” What do you think?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t look much like a jewel thief,” he said.

  “He’s a bookie. Probably working for Pickerill. That’s why Pickerill retired down here. It got too hot for him up North, so he came down here, like a carpetbagger, to run a little betting shop. A dissatisfied client probably stole the jewels to get back at them for cheating him and now they want to blame me so as not to bring the rest of the story to light. Clarence is a crook and now we have to figure out how to get these into the sheriff’s hands. We’ll leave them in the road so Weevil will find them when he comes back.”

  “Dropped there by Clarence when he went fishing?” Henry asked. “And how do you know that Weevil will stop and pick them up, even if he sees them? Sambo won’t say anything as long as they don’t ask him, but if the
sheriff comes and asks, he’ll say he opened the box for you.”

  “There’s got to be a way,” I insisted. “He can’t get off scot-free, while I get blamed.” I was riffling through the pages as I talked.

  Henry picked up the earliest book and thumbed through it. “Couldn’t be Pickerill. He didn’t move here until four years ago and these go back to 1964. What was Clarence doing then?”

  I had to cogitate a minute. “Junior High School, I think—then it must be drug dealing,” I said. “He probably expanded when Pickerill got here to supply him better.”

  “I don’t think a drug dealer would have all these clients,” Henry said. “He’s got about a 10 percent of the population of Mason County in here. Even Daddy Tuttle didn’t do that well with a real Mason County favorite—his whiskey.”

  “Look, most of the same initials continue year after year.” I checked some of the initials in roughly the same place in all four books. And close to the top of the earliest book, I found A, PS—Prudence Smith Abernathy? The date was the date that we got here in 1969—June 1969 to be exact. But there were no dates in the next column. That proved it. I was a potential client, but I’d never used drugs—at least not since I came to the east coast. I checked the second book. My name and no dates. And the same for the third. He was keeping a list of potential clients. And I hadn’t been a customer. I took a quick look at the fourth book to make sure. And there it was—April 4, 1997. The first day we had sex at the Pickerills’. The other dates followed. They seemed about right, as right as best I could remember. Then an asterisk before the end of June. He stopped counting after ten. So I checked for Mable Sharp. June 1, 1997, was the entry date, about the time that she came here. And April 15, 1998, was the first date in the next column, followed by only six dates, the last one just three nights ago. Damned oversexed hussy.

  Without mentioning me, I showed Henry the reference to Mable Sharp and explained what I thought. We checked another name, G, PL, for the chair of the board of supervisors, Priscilla Lattimore Goodenough. Old Oilhead was running about seven times each decade for the past two books. However, there was nothing earlier. Started late, I decided. Then I remembered that her maiden name was Lattimore. There she was—L, P2 in 1970-1979. It was marked number two to distinguish it from L, P1, Patricia Larkin, who was killed in an automobile accident soon after I got here. The last column for L, P2 had a date of January 1, 1972. Well, at least she was out of high school.

  I checked for another person who I knew had died. Old Oilhead’s widowed neighbor. D, O, Mrs. Olive Drexel, who died in 1987 at age ninety-one was listed with a death date but no entries in the active column. Apparently he listed every female he knew in Mason county and only took them off when they died, whether he‘d had sex with them or not. Right on the same page with Drexel, I spied D, B, Betty Duggett, with just an asterisk in the active column. It was the same for the three other books. Apparently, she had no need for individual dates. That explained how he knew about Emily Patowski in Baltimore. I had to laugh. Jack Senior was getting blamed, when in fact the real culprit was Old Oilhead.

  I explained it to Henry as well as I could—leaving my involvement out. He immediately turned to the last book and found A, L for his wife, Lucille Adams. There were no entries for her other than in the third column: January 1, 1990, the date she was entered into the book as a candidate. Switching back to the earlier books, we found the first entry for A, L in column three as January 1, 1982. Still with no additional entries. Henry then tried several other women of Ebenezer Church. They were all entered for the first time on the same date, January 1, 1982.

  “That’s the date when he became an equal opportunity lecher,” I said.

  Henry was laughing and trying to look serious at the same time. “If I catch that SOB making a pass at Lucille, I’ll kill him. Surely I will.”

  And, by that time, I was laughing too, so Henry growled at me, “See if I don’t!”

  Of course, I had to admit that the two-or-more timing weasel made Jack Senior look like a Boy Scout. But the thing about which you really had to laugh was that he never said anything when the guys were bragging. Jack Senior even told me that he was always really quiet when they were telling sexual war stories down at Jezebel’s and he dropped in for a quick beer. Everyone thought he was a prissy wimp. The real reason was that he’d had it off with the wives or girlfriends of half the men in the bar—and the women of the other half were on his to-do list.

  But that wasn’t my problem. My problem was that Old Oilhead’s womanizing probably hadn’t left him any time to steal jewels. At least my foray into his house hadn’t provided any obvious evidence that he had.

  Chapter 9

  The night after returning the lockbox and books to Old Oilhead’s closet I tossed and turned in bed, suffering from a mild depression—no that’s not right—from a massive depression. Not only wasn’t Old Oilhead a good candidate for stealing the jewels, I’d dumped him for the wrong reason: boredom, rather than the fact that he was the premier womanizer in Mason County. I really needed a drink, but ever since we moved from the manor, I hadn’t known where Jack Senior hid the brandy. Of course, there was always Fanny, but there I really would be setting a bad example. She’d have wanted to sit up all night drinking, and that was the last thing she needed. If this crisis ever got over, I planned to ask around as to what made an alcoholic. I thought maybe Fanny was ready for help, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to piss her off, because when push came to shove, she was the only soul mate I had.

  On top of everything, I had these little spurts of guilt for having pushed Jack Senior’s car into Baltimore harbor, but then the feeling would pass, because, in the scheme of things, it was pretty small potatoes. So I kept going up and down emotionally, sleeping in fits and starts until Jack Senior came in about two a.m. and crawled silently into bed. Then I couldn’t sleep at all.

  The next morning I decided to work the frustration off by futzing with the steeple over at Henry Adams’s. When I got to my kitchen door it was pouring, so I just sat for about an hour watching the rain come down—and wondering—and then decided that I wasn’t doing myself any good unless my object was to get even more depressed. So I put on my rain gear, cranked up the van and headed out in the direction of Henry’s barn.

  ***

  Which was unrecognizable. Normally all the stuff Henry needed for shoeing horses was neatly arranged in the center of the barn, beside his big forge with its automated bellows, and all his welding gear would have been hanging against the back wall. The open spaces usually had a few odd parts lying around, but today there were partly-cut-up pieces of iron and steel completely covering the floor. Henry was welding a piece of wheel strut to an eight-foot length of I-beam that formed the center support of the emerging spire. Stuart was holding the piece in place, as well as holding up the rough sketch that I had given Henry several days ago.

  Henry looked at the sketch and then back at what he was working on. “It would be nice if the sketch were a little more complete,” he said.

  “Well, we didn’t know what metal parts were going to be available. The drawing only gives the basic shape,” I explained. “For the details you got to feel what the material gives you. Here, let’s move that strut up about three inches.”

  And that how it went for about two hours. I got my welding outfit out of the truck so we could both work simultaneously, with Stuart running back and forth holding parts where he was most needed. Every half hour or so we stopped and surveyed the structure, cutting and rewelding pieces as the spirit and aesthetics moved us.

  ***

  At the last review, we decided to move some angle iron that had been put on during the first half hour. Henry finally objected, “We can’t keep moving pieces. That’s a brace from an old windmill tower and it’s always gonna be a brace from an old windmill tower. Moving it won’t help.”

  “But look.” I ran over to the table and got the book on African artifacts that Stuart still had in the
stack from the library. “Putting it above the spokes to that old wheel sort of makes the two pieces together look like a mask, and building up a collage of all the pieces sort of gives the impression of one of those modern European church steeples.

  “Impressions, Sminpressions,” Henry said, unimpressed with my logic.

  “Look here at this picture of a Gothic spire.” I took the book on medieval architecture from Stuart’s little pile and spun it around so that Henry could see. ”It works realistic details into an abstract whole. Each part looks like something definite. The gargoyles look like gargoyles, and this little squirrel looks just like the squirrels you see right here in the yard. And this ugly dragon is just like some of the women around here, I suppose.” Then wishing I could get the last part back. We never discussed spouses.

  But Henry just gave me a stare and shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said, adding, “At least not most of the time.”

  And to prove him right, Lucille came into the barn, carrying a tray of sandwiches, coffee for Henry and me, and a hot chocolate for Stuart—Stuart said coffee made him nervous but I’d never seen him nervous so I didn’t know what he meant. On the other hand, I’d never seen him drinking coffee either. Stuart had just showed up one day about two years before the events of this story, and Henry had put him to work in return for a room at the back of the barn and minimum wage. In fact, that’s what I paid him when he worked for me. Nobody knew whether Stuart was his first or last name. And nobody knew his race. He had a golden tan color, the most alarming sky blue eyes, and hair with just a little curl but not a distinct crinkle to it. They said around here that he’d spent three years at one of those boot camps for wayward youths down in south county. Now, nobody spends three years in boot camp, but the authorities didn’t know when he was to be released because there was no paperwork sending him there in the first place. Apparently, he’d just wandered in.

  When they finally figured out he wasn’t there for a crime, he was out like a shot. “The state can’t afford to spend money on people who are not criminals.” Jack Senior had explained—back when we were still talking. Now lest anyone in the audience think that makes Jack Senior a rabid law-and-order conservative let me note that about two sentences later he pointed out that spending money on the criminal class was why we paid the salaries to politicians. Jack Senior was pretty evenhanded with his social and economic dislikes—spreading his condemnations around equitably—except for those people who didn’t work at all. They were considered the necessity that made everything else run smoothly.