“Gene Coyle,” the man said. “Pleased to meet you.”
Coyle wasn’t what Sam expected. He was a head shorter than Sam, a wiry little fella who carried himself with an attitude that was bound to be described by most people as feisty. He wore a Coyle Sand and Gravel gimme cap, and looked at Sam through rimless, wire-framed glasses. He had a good grip, though, Sam found when he shook hands with the man.
Without thinking, Sam said, “Sam Fletcher.” He wasn’t used to introducing himself as anybody else. He hoped Coyle wouldn’t connect his name with Phyllis and remember that the two of them had been involved in investigating several murders in the past.
Of course, it probably won’t matter if Coyle isn’t actually a killer, Sam reminded himself.
Coyle didn’t show any reaction to the name, just waved Sam into the chair in front of the desk and said, “I hear you need some gravel.”
“Yeah, I’m puttin’ in some culverts on a piece of property I own outside of town. Gotta put in some roads so I can break it up and sell it in smaller lots.”
Coyle nodded and said, “If you’re building roads, you’ll need more than half a dozen loads.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m just startin’ with the culverts. I figure the whole project’ll take a while.”
“How big is the property?”
“Fourteen acres,” Sam said. He had worked out some of this in his head on the way out here and was coming up with the rest of it on the fly. “Thought I’d break it into twenty lots for houses. Those’ll be pretty good-sized lots this day and age.”
“That’s true,” Coyle agreed. “The housing market’s not great right now, though.”
“It is what it is,” Sam drawled. “I don’t see it gettin’ a lot better anytime soon, and I hate to see property just sittin’ there. You know what I mean?”
That put a thin-lipped smile on Coyle’s face. He said, “Yeah, I do. You’re a go-getter like me, aren’t you, Sam? You need to be accomplishing something all the time, even if the circumstances aren’t the best for it.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“You’re going to need, oh, forty or fifty loads before you’re through.” Coyle pulled a calculator over to himself, turned it on, and pushed some buttons on it. “I can give it to you for, let’s see, a hundred and seventy-five a load. That’s eighty-seven fifty . . . call it eighty-five hundred. How does that sound?”
“Pretty good,” Sam said. “Pretty good. You don’t mind if I mull it over a little, do you? I wasn’t figurin’ on linin’ up the whole project at once.”
Coyle leaned back and waved a hand. “Sure,” he said. “I can’t guarantee how long that price will be good, though. This business is pretty volatile.”
Sam wasn’t sure why the price of sand and gravel ought to fluctuate that much, but he wasn’t an expert on the subject, either.
“I’ll get back to you pretty quick,” he promised, even though he had no intention of doing so. He looked around at the gun cabinet and the mounted heads and said, “You look like you’re quite a hunter.”
A proud smile immediately lit up Coyle’s face. He said, “I like to think so. Not a one of those bucks is less than ten points, and I’ve bagged a bunch of ’em almost that good. I’ve got a lease over in the Palo Pinto Mountains. You hunt?”
“Not as much as I used to. These bones of mine are gettin’ too old to be trampin’ around in the cold and the damp.”
“I love it. There’s nothing like it. Man pitting himself against nature.”
It seemed to Sam that man had an unfair advantage most of the time, but he didn’t say that. Instead he told Coyle, “You must be a pretty good shot.”
“See that twelve-pointer?” Coyle pointed at one of the mounted heads. “I knocked that son of a gun down from five hundred yards.”
Sam let out a low whistle of admiration.
“That’s some pretty good shootin’,” he said.
“I’ve got a good eye, if I do say so myself.”
“Well, I’m mighty glad I came in here today, Gene. I can call you Gene?”
Coyle nodded.
“I’ve got a feelin’ you and me are gonna hit it off,” Sam went on. “Makes me even gladder I voted for you in that election. It’s just a damn shame you didn’t win.”
Coyle’s narrow face darkened with anger. He made a slashing motion with his hand and said, “Ah, I should’ve known better than to ever get mixed up in politics! They’re all a bunch of crooks, if you ask me.”
“Especially that fella Loomis,” Sam said, shaking his head. “I don’t see how he keeps gettin’ reelected. You’d think folks’d catch on to what a varmint he is.”
“He’s good at fooling people, and he knows how to cheat and get away with it. He slung so much mud at me during the campaign, it’s a wonder I didn’t drown in it.”
“Well, it’ll catch up to him one o’ these days. A fella can’t just keep goin’ through life like that, hurtin’ people, without gettin’ his comeuppance sooner or later.”
Coyle snorted and said, “It can’t be soon enough to suit me.” He put his hands flat on the desk and went on. “But that’s over and done with. I’ve put it behind me.”
Sam doubted that. It looked to him like the election campaign and subsequent defeat at the ballot box were still eating at Coyle pretty fiercely.
“You think you might run again sometime?”
“Maybe. You never know.”
“Well, you’ll have my vote if you do.”
“I appreciate that.” Coyle got to his feet and held out his hand to shake again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Sam . . .”
“I understand.” Sam stood up, too, and gripped Coyle’s hand. “I reckon we’ve both got work to do. I’ll give you a call later today or tomorrow.”
“That’s fine. Thanks for coming by.”
Sam left Coyle’s private office and waved at the woman in the Western shirt on his way out. Lou was still hunched over the other desk, peering at the computer screen as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. From this angle Sam could see that the man was playing solitaire.
He got in the pickup and headed west on the interstate again. Phyllis was going to be mighty interested in what he’d found out, he thought.
If the killer’s target really had been Clay Loomis, then Gene Coyle was about as perfect a suspect as you’d ever find.
Chapter 14
Phyllis spent the morning making the macaron shells and filling them with the baklava mixture that had set overnight in the refrigerator. With that done, the finished cookies went back in to chill more. Like a fine wine, they needed to mature to be at their best. In this case, that would take another twenty-four hours in the refrigerator.
From time to time she checked the curb in front of the house, which had remained empty. She was glad that Felicity Prosper seemed to have given up, but at the same time she was surprised. The young woman had seemed quite determined to get the story she wanted. Actually, stubborn as a mule might be a better way to put it, Phyllis thought.
Sam came in later in the morning, and Phyllis could tell from the look on his face that he was pleased with the results of his visit to Gene Coyle.
“You must have been able to talk to him,” she said.
“I did,” Sam replied. They went into the kitchen, where Sam poured himself a cup of coffee to warm up. When Phyllis offered him one of the remaining cupcakes and he declined, she knew that he must be excited about the case.
They sat down at the table, and he told her about his conversation with Coyle. When he was finished, Phyllis said, “He sounds like an unpleasant man.”
“Yeah, I didn’t like him, but just about everything he said pointed right to him as a possible killer. If he wasn’t just braggin’ about what a good shot he is.”
“Do you think he mi
ght have been doing that?”
Sam frowned in thought, then shook his head.
“No, I reckon he was tellin’ the truth. Not that I’d trust him about much of anything, but he didn’t have any reason to lie about that. As far as he knew, I was just another good ol’ boy he figured on doin’ some business with.”
“Was that a good price he quoted on the gravel?”
Sam held out a hand, wobbled it, and said, “Not really. Not for the number of loads we were talkin’ about. He could’ve come down a little more, I think.”
“Then it’s a good thing you don’t really need fifty loads of gravel.”
“Don’t know what I’d do with it if I had it,” he said with a grin.
They had fried chicken and potato salad for lunch. Sam commented that it was almost like a picnic, except for the fact that they were inside and it wasn’t summer.
Afterward, Phyllis said, “I’d like to find out more about Clay Loomis’s business, but I’m not sure how to go about it. It was believable that you might want to buy some gravel from Gene Coyle, but I don’t think we come across as the sort of people who’d be leasing trucks.”
“Well, there’s really no tellin’,” Sam said. “We could have something that needed transportin’ from one side of the country to the other, I suppose.”
“Maybe,” Phyllis said, but she didn’t sound convinced. “There’s also the problem that Loomis might recognize us from a couple of nights ago. He would have seen us talking to Mr. McCrory before the parade started and then, of course, after all the commotion, too.”
“After the murder, you mean,” Sam said grimly. He gave a little shake of his head, as if trying to put that part of it out of his mind. “I’m not sure how much attention Loomis paid to us. Before the parade, he was too busy oglin’ those teenage elves, and afterward he was pretty shook up.”
“Still, if he knows who we are, he might not be willing to talk to us. We need to find a time to visit his company when he’s not there.”
Carolyn had come into the living room while they were talking. She said, “I can help you with that.”
Phyllis and Sam turned to look at her.
“What would you do?” Phyllis asked.
“Why don’t I call the place and ask for this man Loomis? If he’s not there, you’ll know it’s safe to pay the place a visit. If he is and they start to put me through to him, I’ll just hang up.”
“All right. That might work,” Phyllis said. “Use your cell phone, so my name won’t come up on the caller ID.”
“Neither will mine,” Carolyn said. “I pay to have it blocked when I call someone. I don’t want anybody stealing my identity.”
Phyllis wasn’t sure how that would help prevent identity theft, but paranoia sometimes came in handy, she supposed.
It took only a couple of minutes online to find the number of Cross Timbers Transport. Carolyn called it, waited for an answer, then said in a brisk, businesslike tone, “Clay Loomis, please. Joan Dawson from the Texas Department of Transportation.”
Phyllis’s eyes widened at her friend’s audacity. She hadn’t expected Carolyn to pretend to be an official from the state government.
“He isn’t, eh?” Carolyn went on. “When do you expect him back? No, that’s all right. I’ll give him a call again tomorrow. It’s nothing important—just routine.”
She broke the connection, turned to Phyllis and Sam, and said, “He’s out of the office and won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Phyllis said. “But you can’t go around impersonating a state official like that! You could get in trouble.”
“I just said the first name that came to my mind. Anyway, I thought they’d be more likely to cooperate if they believed they were dealing with some bureaucrat,” Carolyn said. “And I was right.”
“You had the act down, too, except for one thing,” Sam said.
“What’s that?”
“When you said the call wasn’t important. Every government bureaucrat I’ve ever run across, from the Feds on down, thinks what they’re doin’ is the most important thing in the world.”
• • •
The headquarters of Cross Timbers Transport was located on Highway 51 north of Weatherford, on the way to Springtown. It was a pretty bleak-looking place, especially on a gray, chilly day like today. Situated on several acres surrounded by a high chain-link fence, the business was housed in a brick building with a small parking area in front. The rest of the property was paved with asphalt, and two dozen trucks were parked on it. Some of them were just the cabs, while others had trailers attached to make them true eighteen-wheelers. Several tall, shedlike metal buildings were ranked behind the brick office building.
Three cars were parked in front of the office, Phyllis saw as Sam drove his pickup through the open double gates in the chain-link fence and followed a short driveway to the parking lot.
“The place doesn’t look very busy,” she commented.
“No, that’s quite a few rigs to be just sittin’,” Sam agreed. “Of course, we don’t know how many trucks Loomis has in his fleet. Could be he’s got hundreds of ’em leased out.”
“That doesn’t seem likely.”
“Probably not.”
Sam parked and they went inside. The heat was turned up to an almost uncomfortable level, Phyllis noticed immediately.
The only person in the outer office was a birdlike gray-haired woman who wore one sweater and had another draped over her shoulders as she sat at a desk. She has to be the one in charge of the thermostat, Phyllis thought, but even with the heat cranked up as high as it is, the woman still seems cold.
“Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”
“We’re with the Lions Club,” Phyllis said. She and Sam had cooked up the story on the way out here. “We’re going around to the businesses in the area asking for donations to help fund the Angel Tree we always have at Christmastime.”
“Oh, yes, that’s a fine thing that you do,” the woman said. “But I thought people were supposed to take the angels from the tree and provide presents for them.”
“That’s right,” Phyllis said, “but there are always angels who don’t get picked. People can only do so much these days, you know, especially with the way the economy is. So the club always provides for those children.”
Phyllis felt a little bad about using such a good cause as part of their cover story, but if they actually got a donation, they planned to turn it over to the Lions Club, along with a donation of their own, so it actually would do some good.
“That’s wonderful,” the woman said. “Let me get my purse.”
“Actually,” Phyllis said quickly, “we’re handling corporate donations, so if we could speak to the owner . . .”
She knew from Carolyn’s call that Clay Loomis wasn’t there—unless he had returned unexpectedly. So she held her breath a little as she waited to see how the woman would react.
“Oh, Mr. Loomis isn’t here this afternoon. I’m sorry. My, that man’s popular today.”
Sam had brought a clipboard with him. He looked at the paper on it, which was a printout of the TV schedule for that evening, and said, “How about his partners? Mr. Ridgely and Mr. Hedgepeth?”
The woman’s eyes widened slightly as she said, “Oh, they’re not here anymore. I mean, they still own part of the company, I suppose, but there’s some sort of legal trouble between them and Mr. Loomis, so they don’t come into the office anymore.”
“Really? We’ve still got ’em down on our records.”
“Well, like I said, technically they’re still partners.” The woman lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “But they’re suing Mr. Loomis.”
“That’s terrible,” Phyllis said. “I suppose business partners fall out from time to time, though.”
The woman said primly, �
�They do when two of them believe that the other one has been embezzling funds from the company.” Then she put a thin, long-fingered hand with almost transparent skin to her mouth. Blue veins showed through the back of the hand. “Oh, my goodness. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You don’t have to worry about us,” Phyllis assured her. “We’re not interested in anyone’s personal business.”
“Neither am I, but it’s hard not to hear things when you work here.”
Phyllis remembered something, and reached over to take the clipboard from Sam. She pretended to look at it, then said, “We also have Jaycee Fallon listed as the office manager. Is that you?”
She remembered the photograph she had seen in the newspaper supplement and knew that unless Jaycee Fallon’s appearance had changed dramatically, this woman wasn’t her.
“Goodness, no. Jaycee left, too. I used to work here part-time, and now I’m filling in for her, I guess you could say.”
“Did she leave to take another job?”
“She left because she broke up with Mr. Loomis.”
“Oh,” Phyllis said. “I didn’t know—”
“I shouldn’t be talking out of turn, but it was like something from a TV show. I mean, poor Mr. Loomis left his wife for Jaycee, and then she turned around and left him. You should have heard all the yelling when she broke it off with him.” The woman sighed and shook her head. “It’s just been such an uproar around here. I’ll be glad when things just settle back down.”
Phyllis tried to sound sympathetic as she said, “I imagine so. A lawsuit, a divorce, and an angry mistress. It does sound like a TV show.”
The woman frowned a little and said, “I didn’t mention anything about a divorce.”
“Well, I just assumed that Mr. Loomis was divorcing his wife,” Phyllis said quickly. “Since you said he left her, I mean.”
“Actually, she’s the one who filed for divorce. I don’t know why people can’t just stay married. I mean, you don’t have to be happy to be married to someone. I know. I was married for forty years.”
The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer Page 11