“Oh, we understood,” Bernie said, gesturing to her sister. “We just thought we should talk in person before we get lawyers involved.”
Moran scowled. “Lawyers?” The word came out as a croak.
“They’re usually involved in lawsuits,” Bernie explained helpfully, warming to her topic.
Moran snorted. “You suing me? Right. When pigs fly.”
“There are going to be a lot of them in the air soon then, because I’m being serious.”
“And on what grounds do you propose to sue me?” Moran asked, curiosity getting the better of him.
“On the grounds that there should be some way to open the roof door from the outside.”
“There’s an alarm on the outside, which is supposed to deter unauthorized access.”
“Which wasn’t working,” Bernie countered.
“It was.”
“It obviously wasn’t. I don’t even think that’s a discussable issue,” Libby said. “The issue is, why did you lie to us?”
“I didn’t,” Moran insisted.
Bernie shook her head in mock disgust. “We have people who will testify to the contrary. At least respect us enough to tell us the truth.”
Moran straightened his back. “Fine. You want to know?”
“Yes, we do,” Libby answered.
“Because I had better things to do that night than take you on a guided tour of the building,” Moran said.
“Like what?” Bernie asked.
“I don’t have to answer that,” Moran said.
“That’s true,” Bernie replied. “But it would be helpful if you did.” Then she added a please.
Moran looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Ah. What the hell. Mostly, it was a liability issue. But the fact remains that you shouldn’t have been up there in the first place. You had no business up there. None. You were trespassing. And now I have to have the door replaced. Do you have any idea how much that’s going to cost me?”
“That’s what you have insurance for,” Bernie observed.
“I can’t claim this,” Moran said. “I just told you that.”
“We can fix the door if you want,” Bernie said.
Moran snorted at the idea. “Fat chance.”
“We could have died out there,” Libby observed, her voice floating out from the van. “We can sue you for negligence.”
“Oh, please,” Moran growled. “No one would take the case.” He took a deep breath and stood up straighter. “This is a ridiculous conversation.”
“I agree,” Bernie said. “Let us fix the door for you as a way to make amends.”
“I don’t want you to make amends,” Moran retorted. “I just want both of you out of here.”
“Are you sure?” Bernie asked, baiting him. “It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes at the most, especially if we can borrow your screwdriver.”
Moran pointed to the road leading up to the Berkshire Arms. “I want you gone. You two are nothing but bad luck.”
“No,” Libby told him. “It’s your building that’s bad luck. Nothing good has ever happened here.”
“Superstitious nonsense,” Moran snapped. He pointed to the road again. “Now, get out of here and don’t come back. You’ve caused enough grief.”
Bernie noticed a uniform heading in Moran’s direction out of the corner of her eye. “We’re going,” she told Moran. “No need to get upset.”
Moran visibly relaxed.
“I just have one question,” Bernie said before she turned toward the van. “Did you kill Darius Witherspoon, as well as his wife? I mean, you might as well tell us now if you did, because we’re going to find out sooner or later.”
Moran got red in the face again. “Out!” he yelled. “Get out now.”
“Jeez. You know, you’re really quite an emotional guy,” Bernie observed as she turned and headed for the van. “I thought you were a cold fish, but I can see that I was wrong.”
“That’s it,” Moran spluttered. “I’m having you arrested.”
Chapter 31
“He isn’t very happy with us,” Libby observed as she watched Moran talking to the uniform who had been walking toward him. Moran was waving his hands up and down and gesturing in their direction. Libby decided he wasn’t saying nice things as Bernie slammed the van door shut. The lock didn’t catch, and she had to close it again.
“No, he isn’t, is he?” she replied.
“Do you really think he killed the Witherspoons?” Libby asked.
Bernie shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“Anything is possible,” Libby noted. She looked at her sister, taking in her expression. “You don’t really think he did it, do you? You just wanted to see how he was going to react.”
Bernie turned and studied Moran. “Which is not very well. But you get people angry enough and sometimes they say things they don’t mean to.”
“Frankly, I wouldn’t be happy either if someone damaged my property and then accused me of a double homicide,” Libby pointed out.
“There is that,” Bernie allowed. “However, he was at the Berkshire Arms the night Darius died.”
“We saw him after Darius died.”
“He was there pretty quickly, so he couldn’t have been that far away.”
“True,” Libby said.
“So that’s number one.” Bernie touched the pinkie on her left hand with the ring finger of her right hand. “Number two. Getting the key to Darius’s apartment wouldn’t have been an issue since it would have been on file in management’s office in case of emergency.”
Libby nodded. That was true, too.
“Or,” Bernie continued, “he could have knocked on Darius’s door and said he had heard there was a problem with the pipes or something of that nature. Darius would have definitely let him in, and Darius wouldn’t have thought twice if Moran had a coil of rope with him. He would just assume it was part of some job Moran was doing.”
Libby nodded again. “Okay. So Moran had the means, and he had the access, but what would his motive have been?”
“Well, he does have a lot of money tied up in this building,” Bernie said, hypothesizing. “Maybe Darius was doing something that jeopardized that in some way.”
“How?” Libby asked.
Bernie had to admit she didn’t know.
“And speaking of wives, how does Darius’s wife come into your scenario?” Libby asked.
Bernie shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t have a clue. Maybe the same person didn’t kill both of the Witherspoons,” she suggested, although that seemed highly unlikely to her. She stopped talking and watched the uniform turn his head and talk into the radio he was wearing on his shoulder. A minute later, he nodded, said something to Moran, and began walking toward Mathilda. “I think it’s time we left,” Bernie said.
“I was thinking that myself,” Libby agreed. She’d seen the uniform, too, and whatever he was planning to say to them wasn’t going to be good.
As Bernie put the van in reverse, she saw Manny coming out of the Berkshire Arms. “He might know something,” she said, nodding in Manny’s direction.
“Hey, you!” the uniform yelled at Libby and Bernie. “I want to talk to you.”
“Definitely time to go,” Bernie said as Manny got into an old beat-up Chevy. She heard the Chevy’s engine kick over and saw its lights come on. “We should follow him,” she said to Libby as he started out of the parking lot.
Libby nodded as Bernie shifted into drive. By now the uniform was standing next to them. The cop rapped sharply on Bernie’s window.
“You two, out of the car,” he ordered.
Bernie rolled down her window and smiled sweetly. “We’d love to, Officer, but my sister has female troubles. Sorry, but we really have to go, otherwise things are really going to get messy around here,” she told him. Then she stepped down on the gas. Mathilda jumped forward, and the uniform jumped back.
“Female troubles?” Libby repeated as they sped out of
the lot. “I have female troubles?” Her voice rose. “Seriously?”
Bernie shrugged. “Sorry. It was the first thing that came to mind.”
Libby leaned forward so she could see better. “I just hope we don’t get arrested for not stopping,” she said as Bernie started down the winding road that connected the Berkshire Arms with the rest of the town. “That would be the perfect end to the perfect day.”
“Did he ask us to stop?” Bernie inquired as she saw the Chevy’s taillights in front of them. It was a rhetorical question. “I didn’t hear anything, did you?”
“Must be we have hearing problems, along with everything else,” Libby observed. “You should do something about the waxy buildup in your ears.”
Then she stopped talking because she was too busy watching out for deer running across the road, even though she knew the possibility of that was slim. It was dark out now, and deer usually came out to feed at dusk and dawn. By now they were bedded down for the evening. Unless, of course, something spooked them. Like a coyote.
But it wasn’t the prospect of hitting a deer that was giving her a bad case of the cobble wobbles, Libby admitted to herself. No. It was the forest itself. Which was like the ones in the fairy tales. The trees on either side of the road grew so close together, they seemed to be crowding the road, wanting to obliterate it, while the curves were so sharp, you couldn’t see what was coming around the bend. Whenever Libby went down or up this road, she always had the feeling that something in the forest was watching her, something old, something that had no place in the modern world, something that didn’t wish her well.
But that was absurd. She knew that intellectually, but not in her gut. She snuck a look at Bernie. She seemed fine. If the road scared her, she didn’t show it.
Ten minutes later, they reached the bottom of the hill, and Libby exhaled. Manny was nowhere in sight. There were three choices: they could either go straight, to the right, or to the left.
Libby turned to Bernie. “Which way do you think?” she asked her.
“Straight,” Bernie told her, thinking she saw the reflection of taillights up ahead of them.
Libby nodded as Bernie sped up. A minute later, Manny’s Chevy came into view. Bernie slowed down again so as not to spook him. The road they were on, Route 230, or Ash Street, was a back road that cut through the bottom half of Longely, then dipped down and skirted a wildlife preserve, went by two dairy farms, and came up again in the town of Clinton.
Ash started out with large, well-kept seven-bedroom estates with rolling lawns that had been built in the twenties for the railroad barons escaping New York City, then gradually turned into an area with smaller three- and four-bedroom wooden colonials and ranches with two-car garages, which had been constructed in the sixties, their windows still decorated for Halloween and bikes and basketball hoops in the driveways.
Three miles before the town line, the building stock changed again, reverting to older houses that had been constructed in the twenties to house the people who worked at the estates. These houses were small shoe-box affairs. Some of them were well kept, others had flaking paint and sagging porches, while still others lay abandoned, plywood covering their windows, their lawns a riot of weeds. Five miles down the road, the houses ceased altogether, and a wire fence with a wooden sign in front of it announced the beginning of the Peterson Wildlife Sanctuary, a marsh where flocks of birds stopped on their annual migrations.
By now Mathilda and Manny’s Chevy were the only vehicles out on the road. It was pitch black out, with no moon or streetlamps to lighten the night, and Libby was concerned that Manny would spot them when he checked his rearview mirror, but there wasn’t much Bernie could do about it except hang back as far as she could.
For a moment, Bernie toyed with the idea of turning off her headlights, but then she nixed the thought. She wasn’t familiar with the road, and her night vision had never been very good. Her mother had been right. She should have eaten her carrots. Unfortunately, she’d never been a big fan of them. And she still wasn’t. Unless they were in carrot cake, of course.
“We’re going to lose him,” Libby told Bernie as her sister slowed down even more.
“No, we won’t,” Bernie told her. “He’s going to the Roadhouse.”
“How do you know that?” Libby demanded. “Maybe he’s going to Clinton.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Bernie said.
“A buck says he goes to Clinton,” Libby countered.
“You’re on,” Bernie told her.
Libby nodded and struggled to keep her eyes open. Right about now she’d give anything for a cup of coffee and a piece of warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream melting over its top.
Chapter 32
The Roadhouse was a dive bar housed in a rickety-tickety structure that was built sixty years ago and had been threatening to fall down ever since. Every five years or so someone on the Longely Common Council would bring up a motion to tear the place down, but then someone else would remember that the Roadhouse straddled the line between two counties, and the motion would be tabled.
When Libby pulled into the Roadhouse parking lot, she spotted Manny’s Chevy, bathed in the red light of a blinking neon OPEN sign. He’d parked near the door, along with a handful of other vehicles. The place filled up on the weekends with college kids, townies, and bikers but was empty most of the rest of the time. It had been years since Bernie had been there, but as soon as she and her sister walked in, she smelled the old familiar odor of stale beer and cigarette smoke, the Roadhouse being one of the few places in the area where the no smoking law wasn’t enforced.
It seemed as if nothing had changed while she’d been away, Bernie reflected. License plates from Texas were still tacked up on the walls, the tube lights hanging from the ceiling were still crooked, the mismatched tables in the back still looked as if they had a layer of grime on them, and the picture on the TV was just as blurry as it had ever been.
Not that any of that stuff mattered, because the bands that the owner, Rick Henderson, booked were good, the dance floor was large, the beer was cold and cheap, and no one checked IDs. Yes, she’d had some good times here, Bernie recalled with a smile as she nodded her chin in Manny’s direction. He was sitting at the far end of the bar, hunched over his beer and talking on his phone.
She held out her hand. “One dollar, please.”
Libby extracted her wallet from her pocket, took out a bill, and slapped it in the palm of Bernie’s hand. “With pleasure. At least we don’t have to drive to Clinton,” she told Bernie as she headed in Manny’s direction.
“Were you following me?” he asked, putting his phone down, as Bernie and Libby sat down next to him.
“As a matter of fact, we were,” Bernie replied. The bartender walked over, and she ordered two Blue Ribbons, one for her and the other for her sister. This was not the sort of place where you ordered a microbrew, not that Rick would be stocking eight-dollar beers, anyway.
Manny slid the bowl of peanuts over to Bernie and Libby. “I figured that might be you when I saw your van pulling into the parking lot.”
“Yeah,” Bernie remarked. “Mathilda might be many things, but inconspicuous isn’t one of them.”
“True,” Manny said, pushing a handful of peanut shells onto the floor. Bernie watched them fall. The floor was clean now, but on the weekends she remembered crunching as she walked.
“I used to come here a lot,” Bernie said.
Manny pointed down to a name carved into the oak bar. “Is your name here?”
Bernie laughed. “No. My name is on one of the tables in the far corner.” She’d done it with her friend’s Swiss Army knife. That had been fifteen years ago. Fifteen years. It didn’t seem possible. She wondered if the table was still there—it probably was—and decided to check and see before she and Libby headed out.
“My boss is not happy with you,” Manny announced as the sisters started to shell and eat the peanuts.
“To
put it mildly,” Libby said, surprised at the depth of her hunger. She knew she was hungry, but she hadn’t thought she was that hungry.
Manny took a sip of his beer and put the can down on the bar. No coasters here. “I heard him on his phone. He was screaming at the chief of police, telling him to arrest you. He called you menaces.”
Bernie chuckled. “Menaces. I like that.” She popped a peanut into her mouth. “Lucy did pull us in, so I guess he listened,” Bernie allowed.
“Then how come you’re here?” Manny asked, turning toward the sisters.
“Obviously, because there wasn’t enough evidence to hold us,” Libby said. “Anyway, Moran was lucky. It could have been worse.”
“How do you figure that?” Manny asked. “I’d say having two corpses turn up on your property is not good for sales.”
“Penelope Witherspoon could have ended up somewhere in the Berkshire Arms itself.”
“This is true.” Manny took another sip of his beer and put the can down. “I’m impressed with your work, door-wise,” he told them after he’d reached over and grabbed a handful of peanuts out of the bowl. “What did you get it off the hinges with, anyway?”
“A brick, a nail file, and the heel of my shoe,” Bernie answered.
“I’m doubly impressed,” Manny said.
“So was I,” Bernie told him.
Manny took a sip of his beer, glanced down at his phone, read a text, then looked back up at Bernie. “My cousin is meeting me here,” he explained.
Bernie nodded.
“You know, Moran’s banned you from the property,” Manny continued.
“So he said,” Bernie replied. She ate another peanut.
“What were you doing up there, anyway?” Manny asked.
“Trying to figure out how Darius Witherspoon’s killer escaped.”
“If there was a killer,” Manny said.
“We think there was,” Libby told him.
Manny leaned back in his chair. “Be that as it may, if you’re smart, you won’t come back to the Berkshire Arms. Moran will probably shoot you if you do.”
A Catered Costume Party Page 15