Halfway to Half Way

by Suzann Ledbetter

  The serving spoon narrowly missed his nose, as Hannah seated Leo in his usual chair at the presumed foot of the square table. The presumed head, of course, was reserved for Sam Spade Bisbee. IdaClare was on Delbert's right and Marge in the desk chair on his left. Rosemary snuggled as close to her Leokins as the corner table leg allowed.

  A bar stool was Hannah's regular perch, as much by default as by the five-to-one vote establishing her the sergeant at arms. In the past, their spirit of democracy encompassed nongumshoe motions, such as whether she should date the sheriff, then sleep with him, then accept his proposal. Abstaining from the voting process had been as futile as abstaining from David.

  When the phone rang, Rosemary leapt up to unhook the receiver and pass it over to Hannah. On the other end Blanche Erlich said, in her adenoidal twang, "I'm sorry to bother you, but is Delbert there, by any chance?"

  Hannah snapped her fingers at him and mouthed the caller's name. Delbert's reaction was electric. Only direct contact with 120 volts might induce the flailing, miming, head-shaking and hand-signaling that translated to "I don't want to talk to her."

  "Go on, give him the phone," Rosemary whispered. "We want to hear him squirm."

  Taking pity on the old fart, Hannah said, "Have you tried the community center, Blanche?"

  A pause, then a snarky "Do you mean Carol Fogerty's house? Or the one that has the indoor pool?"

  Click. Dial tone.

  As the receiver made its way back to Rosemary, IdaClare sneered at Delbert. "So that's why you insisted on carpooling tonight. I've half a mind to call Blanche back."

  "Oh, yeah? Well, get up off the other half and do it, then. The rest of us have a rip-snortin' new case to work on."

  The file folders he distributed had gummed labels attached to their tabs. He'd titled their first "operation" Code Name: Alpha, followed by Beta, Gamma and Delta. Why the Greek alphabet had such cachet was never explained, but the fraternal order of Delbert ordained Code Name: Epsilon as the current topic of discussion.

  Hannah knew she should slam on the brakes before the gang got rolling. And would, after she'd gobbled a fair share of tortilla chips loaded with Rosemary's fabulous dip before Leo shoveled in the rest.

  Rosemary blushed pinker than IdaClare's hair at the barrage of compliments, and promised to bring the recipe to the next meeting.

  Taking that as a cue, Hannah held up the unopened file folder. "I'm sorry, Delbert, but the Beverly Beauford homicide isn't going to be Code Name: Epsilon."

  He peeled an antacid off the roll from his pocket and popped it in his mouth. Passing the rest on to IdaClare, he said, "Fine by me, ladybug."

  She was prepared for an argument. Counterarguments. Another voting minority, and the prospect of holding the Mod Squad hostage, until Mrs. Beauford's killer was captured. Delbert agreeing had Hannah's mental alarm bells screaming a red alert.

  "The Beauford case is a hot one," Marge said. "And—"

  "Gruesome." Rosemary shivered. "Just this morning, I told Leo, since Delbert lost my .45 Magnum, maybe we should buy another one. You know, for protection."

  IdaClare turned to Hannah. "Don't worry, dear. Like Marge was about to say, Delbert told us the case we're discussing today is a cold case. They're all the rage on TV and he thinks we need a change of pace."

  "Tougher nuts to crack, they are, the cold cases." Leo tapped a temple. "To solve them, it is our noggins we must use."

  They always had. It was the escalation from an intellectual exercise to active interference that David objected to. He'd threatened jail time more than once. Home in on Beverly Beauford's murder and he'd have a fistful of bench warrants issued as fast as a judge could sign them.

  "How cold is this case?" Hannah asked, hoping it predated David's employment with the Kinderhook County Sheriff's department.

  Delbert wasn't pleased to have his rip snorter upstaged. "I'll get to that when—"

  "Now, Delbert."

  "Twenty-three years. Satisfied?"

  Hmm. By her reckoning, David would have been in eighth grade and living with his parents and three brothers in St. Joseph, Missouri. Hannah was already in Chicago, well into her second year of answering Friedlich & Friedlich's lone telephone line.

  Gee, she thought, aren't you glad you asked?

  Delbert rose to his feet. His head tipped back and his chin buckled as though he were about to address the top tier of an amphitheater. "At 1300 hours this afternoon, I conducted a CS&IGO for the purpose—"

  "Hold it, Kojak." Marge's pencil lead pecked her steno notebook. "What's a CS&IGO? In English."

  As if the acronym should be as familiar as others he made up on the fly, he replied wearily, "A Covert Surveillance and Information-Gathering Operation."

  Hannah did her own CS on Delbert's outfit. Before she could inquire, he volunteered that a city public works' surveyor can't write as fast as people can gossip about a neighbor they don't like.

  "You posed as a city employee?" she said. "That's gotta be illegal."

  "Not unless you get caught." Either Delbert hadn't, or he'd posted his own bail. "Now, the numero-one rule any professional dick hangs his fedora on is that every case has a premise. Since I already had a beaut to work off of, going undercover was just to put the cherry on the cupcake."

  His expression was as smug as a banty rooster in a henhouse. "Which is, that twenty-three years ago, with malice, aforethought and rat poison, Chlorine Moody murdered her husband, Royal, and buried him in the backyard."

  The melody of "Woof on the Roof" filtered in from the living room. Delbert, Marge, Rosemary and Ida-Clare looked expectantly at Hannah. Leo's back was to her, but if a bald head could project thrall, his did.

  She stifled a laugh. Every fiber of her being wanted to. Notions didn't come more cockamamie than this one, but one unrepressed chortle and Delbert would be furious, or feel like a fool. But if she calmly, tactfully axed the idea, he'd relabel the files, Code Name: Zeta, aka the Beauford homicide.

  "Wow, Delbert," Hannah said. "That's a whale of a premise you have there, all right." A gulp of decaf gave her pesky smile muscles something to frown about. "Except where did you get the idea that Mrs. Moody poisoned her husband?"

  His woolly-worm eyebrows scrunched together. "From you, ladybug."

  Astonishing, how a miniscule amount of liquid sucked down the wrong pipe could choke a person. Coughing hard enough to bruise a lung, Hannah croaked, "Me?"

  "Well, I ding-dang sure didn't snag it out of thin air. What you told me about Chlorine a while back slid right by, at the time. I must not've been at the top of my game, for some reason. But soon as I saw her ugly kisser in the paper, the dots started connecting."

  Hannah thanked Rosemary for the glass of water she'd fetched; Leo's offer to pound her on the back, she declined. "Dots? What dots? I talked to Mrs. Moody once—for ten minutes, tops—and you weren't there, when I did."

  IdaClare read from a page in the file folder with the header, Preliminary Report. "Subject aided in the arrest and conviction of Rudy Moody for possession of illegal weapons. Subject later told P.I. Bisbee, Esquire, that something was fishy about Moody's father taking a powder, when Rudy was a kid."

  Subject, meaning Hannah. Whatever. She thought back—months back, in fact—to David mentioning that Chlorine's husband, Royal, a traveling salesman for a Chicago novelty company, had abandoned his wife and then three-year-old son.

  Shortly after Royal's disappearance, a major toy manufacturer bought the rights to a card game Chlorine had invented and named after her son. At the time, Hannah questioned how a woman who'd never been known as Mrs. Congeniality had mustered that kind of creativity.

  To herself, she'd questioned it. Then something came up between her and David—so to speak—and Hannah promptly and completely forgot about the entire Moody family.

  Therefore, Subject hadn't said a word about it to P.I. Bisbee, Esquire. The notorious conspiracy theorist had fabricated it himself and attached Hannah's name for credibility. "T
hese dots of yours," she said. "Do any of them connect to a motive?"

  "Aw, for crying out loud. Chlorine was married to him. Any half-decent criminologist knows that causes more murders than all the others put together."

  Marge chuckled. "Then it's kind of a miracle that you've lived this long."

  Delbert ignored her and the snickers making the rounds. "I got the same skinny from three different informants. Royal Moody was a good-natured, shirt-off-his-back type. He'd be on the road a week or two, come home for a couple days of Chlorine's nonstop nagging, then he'd light out again. Same routine for years, till he up and vanished off the face of the earth."

  "But the unhappy people, they do that," Leo said. "The money trouble they got, or the life they got, they don't want, so poof. They run away and start over."

  Like I did, Hannah admitted, though Leo was alluding to spouses who drain joint bank accounts, burn their bridges and their IDs, buy new ones and move to Barrow, Alaska.

  "That man downstate did," Marge said. "Remember? I told you about him at a Code Name: Beta meeting. Or was it Code Name: Gamma? Whichever it was, he made it look like he'd been kidnapped and probably murdered. When the police finally tracked him down in another state, he was living with a girlfriend and said he'd had a psychogenic fugue and forgotten he had a wife and kids."

  "He was a nut," Rosemary said. "Kidnappings and murders do happen for real, though. You hear on the news all the time about somebody going missing and the police suspect homicide, but can't find the body."

  "They'd have found Royal's," Delbert said, "if they'd known where to look." He passed out enlarged duplicates of the original Sanity Examiner photo. "Judging by where Chlorine's standing, I'd say what's left of her husband is no more'n fifteen feet behind her and six feet down."

  Hannah held her copy where she could have seen it a few years ago and studied Leo's over his shoulder. On the far left was a bulldozer and the trench for the new, municipal gas line. To the right of center, Chlorine Moody was prostrated against a flowering hedge that resembled concertina wire with leaves. With her face in partial profile and eyes magnified by trifocals, she did appear more frightened than angry about the urban renewal in progress.

  Laying his copy of the photo on the table, Delbert said, "Those bushes she's protecting? They're on the outside and inside of a chain-link fence you can hardly see." A red felt-tipped pen circled offset rows of individual trunks emerging from the ground. "Not grown through it, mind you. Planted."

  IdaClare gasped. "Oh, my stars and garters. He's right. That woman did kill her husband."

  Rosemary clapped her cheeks. "It's as plain as day. Why else would anybody plant roses on both sides of a fence?"

  "I know!" Marge said. "So they couldn't get to the other side." Pausing, she added, "Like why the chicken crossed the road? To get " Her voice trailed away. "Okay, so it sounded really funny in my head."

  Delbert was not amused. He could take teasing nearly as well as he instigated it, just not, as he termed it, when he was professionally ascertaining a modus operandi.

  "Couldn't get to the other side," he repeated.

  Glances were exchanged, then frowns, then Rosemary said, "It is sort of peculiar." She pursed her lips. "Why would you landscape the alley side of a fence?"

  "Because you're crazy about roses," IdaClare suggested. "Maybe Chlorine bought more than she had room for because they were on sale."

  Delbert rocked on his heels, whistling softly.

  "The report, at the bottom, it says there are no roses in the yard anywhere else."

  "Uh-huh. Keep goin', Schnur "

  The font Delbert had used was mercifully large and bold. Hannah didn't have to squint to read a bulleted paragraph on the next page. Her head jerked up. "Are you sure about the trash service?"

  "Saw the truck myself, this afternoon, ladybug. Now, you tell me. Why pay a private hauler to empty your garbage cans at the curb, when city trucks pick up in the alley and the fee's on your water bill, whether you use it or not?"

  He referred again to the photo. "It'd take a hacksaw to free up Moody's back gate, but the hedge wasn't that high or thick twenty-three years ago when she started lugging her trash to the curb."

  "Approximately the time Royal Moody disappeared," Hannah remarked.

  "And according to my sources, approximately the time Chlorine started mowing her own yard. When Rudy got old enough, she'd let him cut the front, but not the back."

  Rosemary blanched and made the sign of the cross. "Sweet heavenly father. She didn't want her son to tend his daddy's grave." Her eyes widened. "Or find it."

  Delbert's fingers curled like claws. With a spooky inflection in his voice, he intoned, "Years ago, somebody gave Rudy a puppy for his birthday. The day after, off to the pound it went. Time and again, that little fatherless boy'd bring home a stray and beg his mama to let him keep it."

  He leaned closer, his narrowed eyes sweeping from Marge to IdaClare and back again. "But there'd be no dog for Rudy Moody to ever call his own. Uh-uh-uh. Dogs smell bones. And when they do, they dig—"

  "Oh puh-leeze."

  Everybody jumped. "Gotcha," IdaClare said, laughing.

  "Goddamn it, you old bat. You're about as funny as a crutch."

  She closed her file folder and shoved it toward him. "Mrs. Moody's odd. Her son's odder than she is—big surprise. Otherwise, there's no proof at all that she killed her husband, much less that she poisoned him."

  "But—"

  "Oh, hush up and sit down. You've had the floor since we started."

  Actually, Delbert seemed grateful for the excuse to retake his chair. Nothing like an afternoon's CS&IGO-ing to wear a guy out, Hannah presumed.

  "No wife ever loved her husband more than I loved Patrick Clancy." IdaClare's raised, pink-polished finger served as a but. "I'd be lying if I denied looking forward to him taking cattle to market, or hieing off to buy 'em. Yes, I missed him. Worried about him. Prayed he'd come home safe and soon, but having the house to myself for a spell was as happy a time for me as it was a vacation for Patrick.

  "That's one of two things wrong with Delbert's premise. Maybe Chlorine and Royal were miserable together, but he was gone more often than not. Why kill a golden goose who brings home the bacon and is scarcely ever underfoot?"

  "Easy." Marge rubbed a thumb across her fingers. "To collect on his life insurance."

  "The motive, yes, it could have been." Leo shook his head. "The collecting, she could not have done."

  "Hey, that's right," IdaClare said. "The court won't declare somebody dead until he's been gone for seven years."

  Rosemary said, "If Chlorine killed Royal for the insurance money, her sitting around twiddling her thumbs for years is my kind of poetry."

  "Still twiddling she is, though," Leo said. "Not every state is the same. In Missouri, if the insured, he goes poof, no settlement is paid until a body is found and identified."

  Hannah said, "Do you mean, if the body is never found, the beneficiary never receives any money at all?"

  Leo nodded. "The insurance company, it may choose to pay some or all of the policy amount. A goodwill gesture. But that is at their discretion."

  Rosemary burst out laughing. "Boy, wouldn't that be a kick in the pants. Pick the wrong state to murder your husband in for the insurance, then find out you can't collect a dime without a corpse. But you can't produce the corpse to get the money, or the cops will nab you for murder."

  Marge said, "I guess that explains why Delbert's still with us."

  A sly grin spread across his face. "What if there was a lot more money at stake than Royal Moody's life insurance policy?" He looked at IdaClare. "What if your scarcely underfoot goose was about to lay such a whoppin' golden egg, he wouldn't leave the nest till the undertaker carried him out?"

  With a flick of his wrist, a worn slipcased deck of cards thunked on top of the marked-up photo at the center of the table. Malcolm, who'd crept up on the pile of people-food dishes Leo had set on the floor,
skittered sideways, as if the bowls were booby-trapped.

  Marge rolled back from the table. "Time out, while I put this mess in the sink to presoak."

  "Good idea," Rosemary said. "I'll clear away the rest of the dishes."

  IdaClare volunteered to help, after she checked on Itsy and Bitsy, then Leo excused himself for a trip to the powder room.

  Delbert howled into the sudden semivacuum, "Where the hell's everybody going? I'm just getting to the good part."

  Hannah absently scratched behind Malcolm's ear and studied the small box of playing cards. An illustration of a somewhat menacing-looking clown was juggling a bright-colored R, U, D and Y. Beneath his dancing clodhoppers, the copy read, "Come One, Come All! RUDY's Tons of Fun for the Whole Family!"