James looked momentarily startled by my quick segue, but he rose to the occasion. “There is. But before I allow you access to the ice cream, let me say that you need to let the police finish their canvass and collect some more information. That’s what they do, and they do it better than you could. If you’re lucky, Detective Hrivnak will share some info with you, and then maybe you can offer her some suggestions—tactfully, of course.”
“And you will be free and clear of any involvement whatsoever. That’s fine by me. We are in agreement to do nothing right now except eat ice cream. And maybe watch a rerun of Law & Order.”
“Wise decision.”
We settled in for the evening. We still hadn’t sorted out where we “lived” in the house—the parlor was gorgeous, but I felt like an interloper sprawling on a couch watching television in there. There was a nice sunroom at the rear, but it wasn’t heated and the old windows weren’t double glazed or even airtight (note to self: buy some putty before winter sets in!). If we wanted to spend serious time there, we’d have to make some changes. For that matter, the couch we were using was both ugly and too uncomfortable for two, plus it sullied the majesty of the parlor. But I didn’t want to relegate either of us to one of the overstuffed chairs we’d brought along; I liked the physical closeness of sitting next to James.
“James, are we looking at furniture this weekend?”
“Huh?” he said, half dozing. “Furniture? Sure, I guess. Where? Auction? Department store?”
“I don’t know. But we’re intelligent people—we should be able to figure that out, right?”
“Okay,” he said agreeably. I’m not sure he had heard me.
—
The next day started normally enough—the new normal, that is—but when I arrived at the Society, Bob nodded toward the corner of the lobby, where once again Detective Hrivnak graced our premises—the second day in a row. She did not look happy.
“Good morning, Detective. Did you want to see me again, or were you just browsing?”
“Ha!” she barked. “I need to talk to you. We’ve found out some new stuff.”
Of course. “My office? We can have coffee.” Of course, if I took her upstairs it might be harder to get rid of her again, but on the other hand, she might be more relaxed and forthcoming.
“Sure, sounds good.” She followed me to the elevator.
While we waited for it, I said, “This investigation is really moving fast, isn’t it?”
She looked around before answering, but there were no staff members in sight. “Yeah, but we only had to look a few blocks in any direction. Not like you—you seem to find trouble spread over a couple of counties.”
“And don’t forget New Jersey,” I added with forced cheerfulness. She was right, but she should be glad, since that put a lot of the Society’s issues outside of her jurisdiction, thus saving her work.
Eric had already arrived and looked startled to see my companion. “Eric, could you please get us some coffee? How do you like yours, Detective?”
“Black’s good.”
Eric raced off toward the staff room, and I escorted Detective Hrivnak into my office. “So, are you asking me questions or telling me something?” I began.
“Both. Like I told you yesterday, we know who the guy was. You still don’t remember him?” When I shook my head, she went on, “Okay, so you said everyone had cleared out of this building by, what, six? Nobody saw him go home—he lived over past Spruce—not that that means anything for sure. But say he didn’t go straight home after work. The guy didn’t look like the fancy-restaurant type, and he was still wearing his work clothes, so where did he go? Had to be either a cheap restaurant or a bar—no shortage of either within a coupla blocks. So that’s where I had my people look first, talking to people, seeing if anybody remembered our vic.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously. “And?”
“Found him. Bar over on Chestnut, the opposite direction from his house, and apparently his favorite, because the bartender knew him. Scruggs sat at the bar and had a burger and fries. Alone, which was normal for him. Or at least alone at first.”
Was she actually spinning out the story? I didn’t think she had it in her. “And?” I prompted again.
“Okay, so he spent an hour, maybe even two hours there. Kept nursing his beer, then ordered a second one. He wasn’t drunk. After a while, when he was paying for one or the other of his drinks, he pulled a handful of change and bills out of his pocket and dumped ’em on the bar, see? And mixed in with the wadded-up bills and coins was this dirty thing, maybe two, three inches long, says the bartender. It was a slow night, so the guys talked, and our guy Scruggs said he found it in a trash heap where he was working and wondered if it was old. So the bartender took a rag and cleaned it up a bit, and said it looked like it’s a thing that goes on a drawer or something. It was brass. Our vic looked disappointed—maybe he was hoping it was gold.”
“Did he say where he got it? Which trash heap? The Society’s trash heap?
“Nah, just that he’d just picked it up, and it was pretty dirty, so it couldn’t have been in his pocket for long. Bartender said it polished up real pretty, and it might have been old. I mean, not something you pick up at Home Depot.”
This was all very interesting, but where was she leading? “Detective, what’s your point?”
Detective Hrivnak grinned kind of wolfishly at me. “Thought you might be wondering.”
At that point Eric appeared with two cups of coffee, which he set down carefully on my desk, making sure there was a coaster under each. I waited as patiently as I could, then said, “Thank you, Eric. Can you shut the door on the way out?”
He retreated silently, shutting the door behind him. I turned back to the detective. “Yes, of course I am. You’re here, so I assume you need me for something. What is it?”
She sipped some coffee before answering. “Okay, so the vic and the bartender were poking at this brass thing, whatever it was, and this other guy came over and looked at it, and he went, ‘Where’d you find that?’ And the vic said something like, ‘What’s it to you?’ And the guy went, ‘Looks like it’s eighteenth century. Was it just lying around somewhere, or were there more bits like it?’ And the vic shrugged, so the new guy sat down and cozied up to him. Then a bunch of people came in and the bartender got busy, and the next thing he knew, he saw the vic and the other guy headed out the door together. And that’s the last he saw of them.”
“Was the bartender able to describe the second man? Was he a regular?”
Hrivnak shook her head. “Nope, the bartender didn’t remember seeing the guy before. White male, maybe in his thirties, average height, average weight, blah-colored hair, blue eyes, dressed in chinos with a Windbreaker. No outstanding physical features at all. There’s a tape, but it’s not worth much—not enough for any good ID.”
I sat back in my chair and thought a moment. “So the good news is, you have a suspect—if Scruggs met with foul play. The bad news is, the description fits about a quarter of the population of the city.” Another question occurred to me then, and I thought I already knew the answer. “Detective, did the police find the curly metal thing on Mr. Scruggs’s body?”
“Nope. Not anywhere near it, either.”
“But his wallet was in his pocket, right?”
“Yup.”
“So you’re guessing that somebody took that thing away with him?”
“Exactly. And we’d like to know why.”
I was getting frustrated. “Detective, I appreciate your sharing this information with me, but what is it you want me to do?”
She grinned. “I want you to find a bunch of old brass things about two inches long, to show to the bartender so maybe he can identify what he saw.”
“Oh, sure, no problem,” I said, not bothering to hide my sarcasm. “You have anything more to go
on?”
“It was flat and kind of curly around the edges.”
That didn’t help much, either. But I had to ask the big question. “Detective, do you believe that this shiny, flat, curly brass whatever-it-is came from the Society?”
“Yup. Don’t you?”
Unfortunately, I did. “And you think it had something to do with Mr. Scruggs’s death?”
Detective Hrivnak didn’t answer directly, but looked at me steadily for several seconds. “Let me know if you find anything that matches the bartender’s description.”
“Of course.”
CHAPTER 7
Having dumped her problem in my lap, Detective Hrivnak departed for her office, escorted downstairs by Eric, who still looked scared to death of her. He’d had some minor run-ins with the law before he came to work at the Society, so I could understand why he was spooked. He returned quickly. “Anything I need to know about, Nell?” he asked.
“No. And don’t worry—it’s not anything bad. She actually asked for my help on something.”
“It have to do with that poor guy who died?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure yet. I’m going to have to think about it. Could you close the door again?”
When he was gone, I sat sipping my tepid coffee and thinking, as I had told Eric. All right, the dead man had had in his pocket a grubby metal object that appeared to be brass when polished. The bartender said he and Scruggs thought it looked old, but they weren’t exactly experts. Then a stranger had walked in and agreed with them, and the stranger and Scruggs had gone off into the night. The bartender hadn’t recognized the stranger, and didn’t have a clue about what qualifications he had to judge random pieces of metal. Not much later, Scruggs had ended up dead in a rather peculiar accident.
I tried to work out a path for poor Carnell Scruggs. He had left the Society at the end of the workday and had apparently gone straight to a pub on Chestnut—only about three blocks away from the Society, toward the north. He had eaten a meal, had a couple of beers, and been befriended by a someone who left the bar with him. It was not clear whether they had stayed together outside the bar, or gone their separate ways. Then the plot got murky: Detective Hrivnak had told me that Scruggs lived a few blocks to the south of the Society, so it was somewhat logical that he might have walked by there on his way home from the bar. Regardless of why he was there, it was when he was near the Society that he had fallen or been pushed in front of an oncoming car and died. The metal object, whatever it was, had not been found on the body, or anywhere around it, although his wallet had remained intact. Was that important or incidental? Maybe he’d given or sold the metal thing to the stranger, maybe his new friend had stolen it, or maybe he’d dropped it somewhere or tossed it away after losing interest in it. I trusted Detective Hrivnak enough to believe that if her crew hadn’t been thorough in their first search earlier, they were going to scour the route Carnell Scruggs had followed now, looking for “an old, flat, curly metal thing.”
Much as I hated to admit it, now that we knew the man had been at the Society on the day he died, the odds were pretty good that he had found this object in the building. From the vague description it certainly didn’t sound like something a man like Scruggs would ordinarily carry around with him. The problem was, the Society had plenty of old, flat, curly things, and they were scattered all over the building. And Carnell Scruggs could have gone more or less anywhere, once he’d signed in, although I had no reason to believe he left the area where he was working. As Hrivnak had reported it, it seemed as though he hadn’t known what it was he’d found. It sounded like something he had just picked up and absently stuck in his pocket. He might not even have looked at that as theft. So where had it come from?
Duh. Scruggs had been part of the crew in the basement. That was the only work going on the day Carnell Scruggs had died. I needed to talk with Joe Logan, the head of the construction crew. I called down to Bob at the desk. “Has the construction crew come in yet?”
“Sure, they were here at seven thirty,” he told me.
“Where are they now?”
“In the basement.”
“Thanks, Bob.” I sat for a moment, trying to frame what questions I wanted to ask without sounding like I was accusing anyone of petty theft. Then I stood up and walked out to the hall. “Eric, I’m going to go downstairs and talk to the construction guys. I’m not expecting anyone, am I?”
“No, ma’am, you’re clear.”
“Okay. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but I won’t leave the building without telling you.”
I took the poky elevator down to the basement. It was easy to tell where the crew was working, because they were making a lot of noise. That wouldn’t make the patrons above them in the reading room happy when they arrived, but they’d been warned about the construction more than once, and there was nothing to be done about it. I followed the noise and recognized Joe Logan, but not any of the workers. I approached Joe and said loudly, “Can I talk to you?”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s take this outside.” He nodded toward the door I’d entered through.
We moved out into the hall, where the noise level was much lower. “This about the noise?” he asked.
“No, I expected that.” I moved a little farther down the hall, so no one could overhear. “What can you tell me about Carnell Scruggs?”
“Carnell? Poor guy—never could catch a break. He wasn’t part of the regular crew, but he was usually available on short notice for pickup jobs—I’ve hired him before, short-term, because I wanted to help him out. Terrible thing, what happened. The guy was a little short of a full deck, if you know what I mean, but he was willing and dependable, if you told him what to do. Why you want to know?”
I wanted to say, Because he’s dead, you dope, but I didn’t. “Was he a good worker?”
“Yeah, sure. Not the fastest guy, but he was careful, and he cleaned up after. I had no complaints about him, hired him when I could, like I said.”
“He was working down here the day he died?”
“Yeah. He helped clear out that hole we found.”
Lightbulb moment: What if the curly thing had come from The Pit?
“Where did the stuff you pulled out of it go?”
“You asked us to keep it, so we dumped it in a box, or maybe two—it’s around here somewhere. Wasn’t much down there, mostly trash. Old trash, though. A couple of bottles, broken stuff. Nothing modern, like no plastics. We figured the hole had been covered up a while ago, and then people had put stuff like cabinets on top of it and forgotten about it.”
“Any sign that it had been opened before you found it?”
“Nope, not for a long time. Lots of dust and stuff.”
“Who else was working on clearing it out?”
“I dunno—two, three guys? We didn’t get around to clearing it out until the end of the day, and everybody wanted to get home. I didn’t check to see who did what by then, but I know it got done.”
“How’d you get the stuff out? Was it big enough for someone to fit down there?”
“Just. Carnell was the smallest guy, so we sent him down.”
Bingo! I said to myself.
Joe went on, “Even he could barely bend down to reach his feet. Then he passed whatever he could reach out to the guys at the top. Good thing there wasn’t a lot more, because he wasn’t too happy about it. Didn’t like feeling all closed in.”
I wondered briefly if Hrivnak would send a forensic team to do a proper excavation and analysis of the pit, then almost laughed out loud. The construction foreman was telling me that our dead man had been in the hole on his last day, but we knew that the man had been killed outside. If—still an if—whatever he had carried away had come from the hole, how was I supposed to convince the Philadelphia Police Department that spending time and money on examining the pit would be of any use
? I’d have to settle for seeing whatever else had been pulled up at the time.
Joe Logan was getting twitchy. “We about done here? Because we’ve got a lot to do if you want this project to stay on schedule.”
I turned my attention back to him. “Oh, sorry, yes. Thanks for answering my questions. Are you going to be heading up this project until it’s finished?”
“Yeah, for the construction part. The shelving and HVAC stuff, that gets contracted out.” He led me back to the room where we had started and pointed toward a couple of covered Bankers Boxes shoved in a corner. “There, that’s the stuff from the hole.”
“Would you mind having someone bring it up to my office? That would be a big help.” I wasn’t sure I wanted the mess in my more-or-less-pristine office, but I was worried that the boxes would somehow disappear if I didn’t keep my eye on them. After all, they might contain evidence of a murder. If they didn’t, I promised myself that I would get rid of them.
Joe assigned one of his men to pick up the boxes—which he did as though they weighed no more than his lunch—and he followed me to the elevator, rode up, and then trailed behind me to my office.
I thought I recognized him from my first visit to the basement. “I’m sorry—I never learned your name.”
“I’m Frank. Ritter. Nice place you’ve got here.”
“Thank you, Frank. You can put the boxes anywhere. Were you there when Carnell was clearing out that pit?”
“Yeah, I was there. Awful thing, that. He was an okay guy. He wasn’t real happy about getting more dirt on him, but he did what he was asked.”
“Do you guys get paid daily? Like, at the end of the day?”
“Mostly. Scruggs got paid that day because there wasn’t any more work for him. Was he robbed?”
“I don’t know. He still had his wallet, anyway. Well, thanks for carrying the boxes for me. Was there anything interesting down there, do you know?”
The man shrugged. “Can’t really say. Mostly dirt and broken stuff, as far as I could see. But you wanted it, so here it is. That all?”
Privy to the Dead Page 6