Dead Man's Puzzle
Page 5
Cora filled a saucepan with water, lit a burner, turned it on to high.
Waited for it to boil.
Which took forever. What was it about watched pots?
Cora sighed.
Sherry had a small TV in the kitchen for when she cooked. Cora switched it on, caught the end of a reality show where people were trying to lose weight.
“Send ’em over here,” Cora muttered.
The eleven o’clock news came on. Becky Baldwin’s interview played for the umpteenth time. The Channel Eight news team had no more insight into Mr. Overmeyer’s alleged murder than it had when it broke the story that morning. Chief Harper had yet to comment, but Cora could imagine how he felt. It would be a while before Becky Baldwin was back in his good graces.
The water was boiling. Cora dropped in the noodles, got a fork, stirred them around.
Cooking wasn’t so hard.
Cora got a dog biscuit, tossed it to Buddy.
The doorbell rang.
Buddy went yapping off in that direction.
Cora frowned.
No one came calling after eleven o’clock. Not in Bakerhaven. It just wasn’t done. Who could it be? Harvey Beerbaum? If it was him, his chances of marrying her would have dropped from next to nil to half-past hopeless.
Cora scowled at the door. Apartments in the city had peepholes. In the country, you never knew who was on your front stoop.
She pushed back the blind on the window, peered out.
Standing outside was a man in a stocking cap. That was a bad sign. It wasn’t cold enough for a stocking cap.
And Cora didn’t know him.
Cora fumbled through her purse, gripped the handle of her pistol. Wondered how she ever got along without a safety chain on the door. She really should install one. Of course, she only ever thought of it in moments she needed it.
Cora opened the door a crack. “Yes?”
“Miss Felton?”
“Yes?”
“I need your help.”
“Why?”
“I’m scared.”
“How come?”
“Mr. Overmeyer.”
“What about him?”
“He was killed.”
“How do you know?”
“It was on the news.”
“Oh?”
“You gotta help me.”
“Why?”
The little man shuffled his feet.
“I’m afraid I’m next.”
Chapter 12
Cora’s visitor sat on the couch. He wore blue jeans, a plaid shirt, a peacoat, and a stocking cap. He was shivering. His eyes were watery, and his nose was running.
“You’re cold. You want some tea?”
“No.”
“Good. You wouldn’t get it. It’s late, I’m tired, you got in by saying the magic words. Who are you and what do you want?”
“Stockholm.”
“Like the syndrome?”
“Excuse me?”
“Skip it. How do you know Overmeyer?”
“We go way back.”
“You don’t look old enough.”
“He knew my father.”
“Where?”
“Is it important?”
“No. I don’t feel like cross-examining you. You got a story to tell, tell it.”
“Fifty years ago, Overmeyer and my father were partners.”
“In what?”
“An investment.”
“What kind of investment?”
“Stock.”
“Aha.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Nothing. I just have some stocks of my own. I know how volatile the market can be.”
“Exactly. Anything you do, you take a chance.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not like we played the market. We had a little money, we bought some stock, we held on to it.”
“What was the stock?”
His eyes flicked. Cora wondered if he was going to lie. Instead, he evaded.
“You know, fifty years ago everybody smoked.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It looked like everybody always would.”
“So?”
“We bought Philip Morris.”
“Oh.”
“Not a lot. But since then it’s split several times.”
“So why wasn’t Overmeyer rich?”
“He and my father were silent partners. They didn’t hold the stock.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They had the right to the money. It just wasn’t in their name.”
“What gave them the right?”
“Stock-pooling agreement.”
“Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are the other two partners?”
“That’s not important.”
“Are they living?”
“That’s not important.”
“It is to them.”
“The stock belongs to them and their descendants. That doesn’t matter. The point is, there’s four owners. I’m one of them. Overmeyer was another.”
“Who’s his heir?”
“I have no idea.”
“Where’s the stock-pooling agreement?”
“Everyone had a copy.”
“Where’s yours?”
“Mislaid.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“When my father died, I could not find it in his papers.”
“So you went to Overmeyer.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
His face showed impatience. “It doesn’t matter. You’re obsessing about small things. The important thing is if they killed Overmeyer, they could be after me.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re smart. You’re resourceful. You’ll look out for my interests.”
“You live in Bakerhaven?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“That’s not important.”
“It is to me. Where can I reach you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll reach you.”
Cora put up her hands. “No, no, no. This is utterly wacky. Your father and the dead man were in a partnership with two guys you won’t name over a pooling agreement you don’t have that leads you to believe whoever killed Overmeyer may be after you?”
He smiled. “Now you’ve got it.”
“So why aren’t the other two in danger?”
“I’m sure they are. I just don’t care.” His nose twitched. “Something burning?”
“Oh, my God! The noodles!”
Cora leapt up, raced into the kitchen.
The water had boiled dry. The noodles were scorching the pan. Wisps of smoke were curling up to the ceiling.
She grabbed the pot, burned her hand, screamed, cursed, dropped the pot. She shut off the fire, snatched up a pot holder, put the pan in the sink, turned on the water. Jumped back from the mushroom cloud of steam that erupted. As it subsided, she shut off the water, assured herself nothing was on fire.
Cora composed herself, went back to her visitor.
He was gone.
Chapter 13
Chief Harper looked as if he’d just eaten a bucket of nails instead of one of Mrs. Cushman’s blueberry-ginger muffins. “Stock-pooling agreement?”
“Yeah. Can you trace it for me, Chief?”
“Someone named Stockholm bought stock?”
“I admit it’s quite a coincidence.”
“Yeah. Like Moneymaker winning the poker tournament.”
“If the guy’s telling the truth, the stock wouldn’t be in his name.”
“Whose name would it be in?”
“I have no idea.”
“That makes it harder to trace.”
“Yeah.”
“And now I got my own problems. Thanks to Rick Reed and Becky Baldwin,
everyone and their brother knows I got a homicide. Even though I haven’t officially announced it yet.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I want to calm down first. So I don’t bite somebody’s head off. Then you come to me with a stock-pooling story that makes no sense.”
“It makes no sense because we don’t know the details.”
“No,” Harper said. “It makes no sense because it doesn’t make sense. A ninety-two-year-old man living in squalor and all the time he’s got a fortune in stocks squirreled away?”
“Would that be the first rich recluse you ever ran into, Chief?”
“No. But if that’s the case, why do you kill him for it? More to the point, why do you kill him for it if you don’t get it?”
“We don’t know no one got it.”
“Yes, we do. We know no one inherited it. The guy doesn’t have a relative within a hundred miles of here. Make that five hundred. The best I can do is a great-nephew from San Antonio who’s flying in to settle the estate.”
“What estate?”
“Exactly. The guy’s got a ramshackle hut on a quarter acre of land. It might be worth twenty or thirty thousand to anyone who wanted to tear down the house and start over. It’s hard to imagine this guy from San Antonio doing that. So, unless some other heir pops up, he’s likely to turn it over to the local Realtor and go home.”
“Twenty or thirty thousand is a nice piece of pocket change.”
“Can you see some guy from San Antonio sending his uncle poison candy in the hope of picking it up?”
“Was the poison in candy?”
“I’m not sure what the poison was in.”
“From the look on your face, I’d say your coffee. What’s the problem, Chief?”
“What’s the problem? I’ve got a motiveless crime with no suspects. Now you bring me some cock-and-bull story about some guy with no name and no address.”
“You’re the police. I imagine you can get his address.”
“Did he come in a car?”
“If I had a license plate number, I’d have given it to you, Chief.”
“Did he come in a car?”
“He came right up the walk and knocked on the door.”
“Did he come in a car?”
“Damn it, I don’t know!” Cora said irritably. “There. You happy? I was cooking when he arrived, I was burning noodles when he left.”
“Burning noodles?”
“Don’t start with me, Chief. Sherry’s gone, I’m on my own. I’m not having an easy time. I’m not used to being on my own.”
“You should get married again.”
“Is that a proposal? I thought you had a wife and kid.”
“What are you going to do when they get home?”
“Eat.”
“Are you staying there?”
“No. Sherry can’t move in with Aaron’s folks. One of us has to go.”
“You’re moving in with Aaron’s folks?”
Cora grimaced. “Go ahead. Make fun. Just because you’ve got a murder you can’t solve.”
“You can’t either. You didn’t even see a car.”
“Bite me.”
Harper frowned. “If it has to do with stock, what’s it got to do with a computer?”
“Maybe it’s logged in the computer.”
“Hmmm.”
“Or the pooling agreement,” Cora said. “No one’s found his pooling agreement. If it’s written up in WordPerfect, you’d just have to print it out. Of course, then it wouldn’t be signed.” Cora sighed. “Damn. I wish Sherry were here. She knows this stuff. Like how you scan a document and save it as a TIFF or a JFIF or a JPEG.”
“How many shares of stock are we talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the company?”
“Philip Morris.”
“Oh, my God. Overmeyer’s an insider, blowing the whistle on the tobacco companies.”
“Right. So they poisoned him with arsenic. They probably put it in his cigarettes. Can you smoke arsenic? I wouldn’t think so. Cyanide seems more likely.”
“It wasn’t cyanide.”
“You think I’m serious?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m still upset about Becky Baldwin. Coming in here with a cock-and-bull story.”
“Cock-and-bull story?”
“That Dennis is hanging around. I haven’t seen him. Have you?”
“You think Becky invented that story to give her an excuse to drop by the police station just on the off chance you had a murder investigation?”
“No. But suppose she knew about it. Suppose she overheard one of Barney Nathan’s nurses talking about it over lunch. That’s not hard to believe.”
“It demonstrates a level of paranoia I wouldn’t have expected of you, Chief. Then again, if you really think I hid that gun . . .”
“I didn’t say I thought you hid the gun. I said I thought you found the gun. Before you found it with me.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Why? Because it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t do? Actually, it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d do. You may not have done it in this case. That just means you didn’t have the opportunity.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“No.”
“Good. I didn’t think so, but you never know. So, what’s with the gun? You traced it yet?”
“Almost.”
“What’s that mean?”
“We’ve narrowed it down.”
“To what?”
“West Virginia.”
“Oh?”
“The serial number matches a shipment of Smith and Wesson revolvers shipped to Rawley’s Hardware and Sporting Goods in the summer of 1948.”
“Nice work, Chief.”
“Thank you. This information might have been more helpful if Rawley’s Hardware and Sporting Goods hadn’t burned to the ground in 1963.”
“After carefully registering every gun sale with the government?”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice.”
“You mean they didn’t?”
“No, they did. The records just don’t happen to include Mr. Overmeyer’s weapon.”
“So it’s a dead end?”
“At least a detour. At the moment, we’re tracing test bullets fired from Overmeyer’s gun against fatal bullets from unsolved homicides.”
“How long will that take?”
“You’d have to ask Dan.” Harper shook his head. “His last estimate was Christmas.”
Chapter 14
Becky Baldwin frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not a riddle,” Cora told her. “We’re just having a conversation. When do you stop looking for something?”
“You mean when do you give up?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Actually, that’s one answer. When do you stop looking? When you give up. So what’s the other answer?”
“When you find it?” Becky said with ill-suppressed irritation.
“Yes,” Cora said. “You stop looking when you find it. That’s a real danger in a murder investigation. It’s the reason so many innocent people go to jail. The police are looking for a killer, they find him, they stop looking. The fact he isn’t the killer doesn’t matter. The police have stopped looking.”
“That doesn’t fit your premise,” Becky said.
“What do you mean?”
“You said you stop looking for something when you find it. If the person isn’t the killer, then the police haven’t found it.”
“Exactly,” Cora said.
Becky shook her head. “That’s semantically incorrect. Somewhat odd, for a woman of your verbal talents.”
“Don’t be irritating. I’m not playing word games. Just trying to make a point. The police were looking for something. They think they found it, so they stopped looking.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cora told Becky about the clues in the crossword
puzzle.
Becky frowned. “You were looking for a computer and you found a gun? So you stopped looking?”
“Chief Harper stopped looking.”
“Did you point that out to him?”
“I tried. A cursory inspection of the house does not indicate the presence of a computer.”
“Does a cursory inspection of the house make the presence of a computer seem likely?”
“Oh.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Have you seen Overmeyer’s cabin?”
“No. Why?”
“Somehow a computer isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.”
“What is?”
“A HazMat suit.”
“A what?”
“Whatever you call ’em. You know, those bulky space suits when there might be an airborne virus. Like Dustin Hoffman wore in Outbreak.”
“What?”
“You didn’t see it? Probably studying for the bar exam. The point is, I’m going over the place with Chief Harper, we found a gun and stopped looking.”
“So?”
“The problem with searching Overmeyer’s place is he’s only got a quarter of an acre. His neighbors have larger tracts of land, but even so, they’re rather close. They’d be apt to see a car parked in a driveway.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re a lawyer.”
“You want my legal opinion? Butt out.”
“I don’t want your legal opinion.”
“You want me to defend you if you’re arrested breaking into the place?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m glad to hear it. So what do you want me to do?”
“Help me not get caught.”
Chapter 15
“I don’t like this,” Becky said as they drove out of town.
“What’s not to like?” Cora told her. “You’re just giving me a ride.”
“I’m a lawyer. I know the difference between giving someone a ride and being an accessory.”
“An accessory to what? I’m just paying a call on my old friend Overmeyer.”
“Who happens to be dead.”
“He has that character flaw. Aside from that, he’s a hell of a guy.”