Murder Well Done

by Constance Barker

  I checked my email on my phone, and the photos I asked for from Sylvia were there. Red was sitting on the “Pro” side with most of the whittling club and quite a few others, some of whom had to stand behind the eight chairs set out for them. All the pieces were falling into place.

  Just as the mayor gaveled the meeting to order, I saw Tom Hopkins’ widow, Patty, come in the door and take a seat in the last row of chairs. She was very pregnant and holding her toddler by the hand.

  “Okay, let’s get to it,” Mayor Bud Finster said. “You all know why we’re here. We’ll start with a few words from one of the proponents of the street project – Pete Jenkins, you’re first in line, you go first – and Hattie on the opposing side. You can ask each other, or any of the council members, questions. Go ahead, Pete.”

  Pete made his comments about how the new streets would help attract new people to Paint Creek and make things safer for kids on their bicycles. Hattie just really seemed to be there to represent the opposing side to support Tom Hopkins and Patty, but she didn’t have much to say.

  Ronnie Towns from the hardware store and Liz from the salon went next. It looks like Liz was on Tom’s side, so she had no apparent motive to kill him. They talked and argued for nearly 15 minutes and then sat down.

  “Okay, thank you,” Bud said. “Red and Mercy, you two can go ahead.”

  I gave Red the evil eye. He knew what his job was over there on the “Pro” side.

  “Uh, Bud...er, Mayor,” Red said, “I’m still getting my thoughts together. I’m going to yield my time to the next person...Dickie, would you mind going before me?”

  Dickie Gallagher got up eagerly. “Sure, Red. I know what I want to say.” He stood up, went to the podium, and looked back at his brother, Gilbert, who still had his arm in a sling and seemed to be very pale and suffering in pain. Then Dickie tapped the microphone a few times to make sure it was working. He looked at me, at the podium on the other end of the head table. “Ladies first, Mercy. You go ahead.”

  “Thanks, Dickie.” I paused and looked at the good-sized crowd. There must have been 80 people in the room. “I’m not really sure that I’m opposed to the street proposal, but I’ve looked at Tom’s pamphlet, and I want to make sure that we are taking care of our schools and parks too.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about taking money away from the parks and schools, Mercy,” Dickie said. “The people with houses on the streets that are being fixed up will be assessed for part of the cost on our property taxes, and the rest is coming from a Federal grant that our Congressman got us for community renewal and infrastructure.”

  Dickie really seemed to know a lot about it. “But what about our parks and schools, Dickie?” I asked him. “Tom said the money should be spent for those things instead.”

  Dickie seemed to get a little red in the face and irritated when I mentioned Tom. “The money’s not supposed to go for education – that money comes from the state, Mercy. We can pass a school bond if we want new schools too, you know. And Paley Park got all new ball fields and picnic areas with new benches and nice stone grills and a big pavilion with a real nice kitchen. That was just seven or eight years ago. Paint Creek has needed real streets for 50 years – streets with curbs and gutters and storm sewers so we don’t get wet basements every time it rains. Eighth Street is still gravel, Mercy.”

  I wondered why he seemed to dislike Tom – everybody in town always liked him. “That sounds reasonable, Dickie, but why do you think Tom was so opposed to the project then?”

  Dickie was getting agitated. He looked over at his brother, Gilbert, and at me. Then he boiled over and banged his fist down on the podium.

  “Everybody thinks that Tom Hopkins is a good guy, but he’s not!”

  There was a gasp from the crowd. I was nervous and hoped this wouldn’t get out of hand. I looked at Tom’s widow in the back row, and she looked calm.

  “You think Tom really wanted to build schools for our kids?” Dickie asked, getting control of himself. “Well, he didn’t! He just wanted to keep property values down for one more year so he could steal all of our houses – Gilbert’s and mine, and some others too.”

  Everybody in the gallery began talking, and Bud brought down the gavel.

  “We’ll have order here. Dickie, we’re not here to speak ill of the dead. Keep your comments pertinent to the street issue.”

  “Let him talk!” Someone yelled for the crowd.

  “Yeah. We want to hear him out!”

  “I think Tom was trying to take our house too!”

  The gavel came down hard several more times, and the hall became quiet.

  “Go ahead, Dickie,” Bud said, “but keep it brief.”

  I wasn’t expecting anything like this. I wondered if Dickie was getting senile, or if he really had a reason to be upset with Tom Hopkins. “Dickie,” I said to him gently. “What do you mean? How was Tom trying to steal your houses?” Poor Patty had tears streaming down her face now.

  “Well, Mercy, you know he started doing all the home loans for the bank a few years ago. So, Gilbert and I were getting ready to retire, and all 14 of our houses were paid for. So, he called us over when we were in the bank one day last year. He said he could give us a loan on each of the houses so we would have money for retirement and money to travel and remodel the house we live in.”

  I nodded. “I remember you went on that long cruise last year, and Jake and Junior renovated your whole house and added a wrap-around porch while you were away.”

  “That’s right. Well, he set it up so that the payments would come out of our account automatically, and he even added an insurance policy so that everything would be paid in full when either Gilbert or me kicked the bucket. Seemed real sweet for a while. But then six months ago we got a letter in the mail saying he was calling in the loan. We had 30 days to pay it in full, or he was going to take all of our houses.”

  “But why was he calling in the loan, Dickie? How can he do that? And didn’t you have most of the money still in the bank to pay it?” Something didn’t seem right here.

  “Good questions. It seems Tom put a little clause in our loan that said if our property value fell below a certain percentage of our loan balance, he could cancel the loan and make us pay it in full right away. Well, somebody got the county assessor to cut the value of our houses in half because they were on ‘unimproved streets.’ And we couldn’t pay it back because all of the money in our bank account mysteriously got transferred to a bank in the Cayman Islands – and there was no way we could prove the account there wasn’t ours. A little while later, Tom started building that new mansion over northeast. Can I keep talking, mayor?”

  Everyone wanted to hear more, and Bud just nodded.

  “So, all of our houses are in foreclosure now. But if the new streets are approved now and the funding for the project is guaranteed by the government, I could appeal the assessed value and save our properties. But as it is, the bank will get them, and Tom is set to become president of the bank next month. He was going to buy all our houses from the bank for pennies on the dollar – with my money, the money he stole from me and Gilbert. Then, when he lets the street bill go through a year from now, they will all be worth ten times what he pays for them.”

  The crowd couldn’t hold back any longer, and they sounded like a den of hungry lions.

  Sandy Skitter stood up. “He was doing the same thing to me,” she said. “I just never realized until now that it was all an evil plan.”

  There were shouts of “Me too!”

  “Dickie,” I said into my microphone three times, and the crowd gradually quieted down again, with a little help from Bud’s gavel.

  “Yes, ma’am?” He was emotional and on the verge of tears.

  I looked at him and asked as gently as I could, “Is that why you killed him, Dickie?”

  The crowd went into an uproar again, and Bud gaveled it down.

  “Miss Howard,” the Mayor said, “you can’t just go
slinging accusations like that around in a public forum.”

  “But I have the proof, Mayor. It’s true, isn’t it, Dickie?”

  “I ain’t saying nothing.”

  “Well, sawdust, which we can prove came from your whittling knife, was found on Tom’s shirt collar.” I held up my phone and Ruby’s too. “And the marks on his body match the pattern from the floor mat in your trunk.”

  He snapped his head toward me. “Nobody’s looked in my trunk, Mercy, so you’re lying.”

  “It’s the truth, Dickie. When Ruby stopped by with that fruit basket this morning, I followed her over there and let the air out of one of her tires, and she left her jack at home. So, when you changed the tire for her, you had to use your own jack, and she snapped these pictures inside your trunk when you opened it. It looks like Tom’s silk necktie is still in there too – that’s the murder weapon, right?”

  Dickie looked like a cornered rat with nowhere to run. He was sweating profusely now, and he ran behind the head table, but the Mayor stood up to stop him. He was no match for Dickie.

  Dickie put his strong arm around Bud’s neck, holding him like a hostage in front of him, and pulled out his pocket knife. “You all leave me alone and let me out of here, or I swear I’ll cut his throat!”

  Great...now I caused a hostage situation, and Brody isn’t back yet. “Dickie,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill anybody, Mercy...”

  Just then the curtain opened slightly on the stage behind Dickie and Bud, and the barrel of a handgun stuck it’s nose out. Then we all heard the sound of the gun being cocked.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Don’t turn around, Dickie,” Deloris said, stepping out in front of the curtain.

  “How did you get in here with a gun, Deloris?” Dickie asked. “We all had to go through a metal detector today.”

  “That was easy, Dickie. I told them I had a steel plate in my head. My Remington six-shooter fits nicely in my beehive.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me in the back. At this distance, the bullet would go right through me and kill Bud too.”

  “Well, I never cared that much for Bud, anyway. He can be kind of a pompous ass. No big loss.”

  There were chuckles from the crowd, although Bud didn’t seem to see the humor in it.

  “But I do like you, Dickie. Always have. You always protected the girls, carried our books...

  “But none of the girls ever like me...because I was different.”

  “I liked you, Dickie. Do you remember that time when you carried me across that big puddle in the street after a big rainfall? I was in high school and you were still in junior high.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what I did afterwards?”

  Dickie paused and then nodded. “Yes.”

  “What did I do?”

  He looked around, but didn’t speak.

  “Go ahead, Dickie,” Deloris said very calmly. “Tell them.”

  “You let me touch your face.”

  There was a low rumble and some laughter from the crowd.

  “That’s right. And you liked that, didn’t you, Dickie? I liked it to. It’s too bad that people back then didn’t understand autism and Asperger’s.”

  “They still don’t! People treat me like I’m stupid or a child! But I’m not!”

  “No, you’re not. I think you showed everyone here today just how smart you really are, Dickie.” Deloris sat down on the front edge of the stage. She had held the gun down a long time ago, but we were all to enthralled in the conversation to notice.

  “But I’m ‘socially awkward.’ That’s why I could never have a girl or a family.” He was trying very hard to hold back his emotions.

  “Dickie,” Deloris said gently, “now I want you to tell me what happened the night that Tom was killed. Tell us all how Tom ended up dead in Mercy’s dumpster.”

  “You can’t trick me, Deloris.” He still had his back to her, but he was hardly holding onto Bud at all and his pocket knife was at his side. “Nothing I say will stand up in court because you’re holding a gun on me.”

  “Perfect. I don’t want you to get in trouble with the law anyway. So, tell us.”

  Bud reached down to the table in front of him, grabbed his microphone and held it up for Dickie.

  “Well, Tom knew that we were going to tell our story to everybody at the next council meeting, so he got it changed from Thursday to Tuesday, and nobody told us. We figured that if we exposed what Tom was doing, that the council would vote for the new streets and we would be able to keep our properties.

  “Then, when we were finishing up our whittling meeting the same night as the council meeting, about nine o’clock or so, I guess, Tom called Gilbert on his phone. He said that the vote failed – which wasn’t true; it just got delayed – and he wanted to meet us right away. He said he had an idea to help us that would save our properties. Well, you know that little sitting area with tables out in back of our old real estate office downtown. It’s Joan Pianowski’s office now. The agents use it for lunch or smoking or talking to clients sometimes, and he wanted to meet us there. But he didn’t bring us there to help us...he brought us there to kill us.”

  What! Is this possible? Can this meeting possibly get any stranger!

  “Tell us what happened, Dickie,” Deloris said casually, leaning back on her arms now, as Bud gaveled down the crowd again.

  “Okay. We pulled up and Tom was standing by one of the tables in the corner. When we got close, we saw that he had a gun and big smile on his face. We asked what he was doing, and he said that since the houses were collateral on the loan, and the loan was in default now, that he was now the beneficiary on the insurance he sold us. That’s how he set it up. So, if one of us died he would get all the insurance money. And pretty soon he would own the houses too. He asked which one of us wanted to die first, and Gilbert said he did. Gilbert said he should just kill him and leave me alone, because only one of us had to die for him to collect the insurance.”

  Gilbert was in tears now too, and Dickie was barely in control of himself.

  “I walked towards Tom and said, ‘You’re not going to kill Gilbert.’ And he said ‘No – you are!’ He said he was going to make it look like we were really sad about losing everything and got into a fight. People would say that I killed Gilbert and then killed myself. They would believe that, he said, because the whole town thinks I’m crazy. He figured our old office would be a good place to stage the murders. Then he started laughing, and I ran towards him. He raised his gun and fired just as I dove at him. I pushed his gun hand, and the bullet hit Gilbert in the shoulder.”

  Wow! There was a gasp from the crowd again, and Bud pounded his gavel. I guess that would explain why his arm has been in a sling since that day.

  Deloris continued to moderate the conversation. “What happened next, Dickie?”

  “He fell to the ground, and the gun slid away. I held his shoulders down, and I was really mad. He shot my brother, and it was my fault, because he was trying to shoot me, and I pushed his hand.”

  “But you didn’t hit him.” I said, finally speaking again. “There were no bruises on his face.”

  “Gilbert told me not to hurt him, Mercy. I pulled him up by his necktie, and Gilbert picked up the gun and threw it in the little dumpster. He didn’t want Patty to find out about any of this, so we decided not to tell anybody.”

  “What happened then?” Deloris asked him. “Why did you kill him?”

  Dickie got really red in the face, pushed Bud away, and then turned around toward Deloris. “He called me a dummy! He said I was a big dumb oaf, so I grabbed him the way I was holding Bud just now, and my hand was shaking...and I put my pocket knife up to his neck. Gilbert hollered at me to stop, so I pulled my knife away. But it’s really sharp and I cut him a little bit. Then I pushed him away. He stood there and took off his necktie. He was going to wipe the blood off his neck with his
handkerchief, but first he laughed at me and called me a big dummy again. Everything went red, and I guess I grabbed his necktie.”

  He paused. Bud pulled his chair behind Dickie, and he slumped down into it.

  “Next thing I remember, Gilbert is shaking me, and Tom is dead.”

  Everyone got to their feet, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the hall...except for Deloris. She held out her hand to Dickie, and he stood up. I thought she was actually going to show a little compassion and give him a hug. Instead she patted him on the shoulder. “We all understand, Dickie.”

  Patty Hopkins arrived at the front of the hall.

  “I’m really sorry, Patty. We never wanted you to find out about the loans and Tom trying to kill us,” Dickie said.

  She had to stand on her tiptoes and reach very high to give Dickie a hug. “I knew something was very wrong, Dickie. I just didn’t know how bad it really was. I’m so, so sorry.”

  He bent over and hugged her pregnant body very gently as she kissed him on the cheek.

  “And don’t worry, Patty,” he said. “We’re not going to try to take that new house away from you and your kids.”

  She smiled bravely. “Tom’s insurance will take care of us. You’ll get everything back, Dickie.”

  Brody walked in with Deputy Doggerty just then. Stan was holding a plastic bag with a hand gun in it. I had filled Brody in by phone about what was going on. The dumpster at the Realty House had not been emptied yet, and the gun was still there. Dickie’s story was true. Brody joined me in the front of the hall.

  “Nobody got shot,” I said to him.

  “I don’t think you get extra points for that. You know I have to cuff him, right?”

  I sighed and nodded. We walked over to Dickie, and Deloris took the cuffs from Brody.

  “Sorry, Dickie,” she told him, “but you know the way this is done.”