3 - Buffalo Mountain: Ike Schwartz Mystery 3

by Frederick Ramsay

  Their waitress arrived dressed in what Ike assumed Frank Chitwood thought must look like a Parisian maid. She looked more like an Apache dancer. She took their orders and retreated.

  “If you look at old films from that era,” Weitz continued, “black and white, maybe even a silent one, the people depicted as living in the mountains back east, the hillbillies, if you will, really dressed and acted and looked very much like the ones in the films, only they were real, not acting in some buffoonery. At the remove of more than three quarters of a century and the two generations who’ve never read the late Al Capp’s Lil’ Abner, we think the image must have been overdone and our natural predilection to slip into politically correct thinking means we reject the whole as something bordering on a kind of racism. I am not, by the way, suggesting that what Hollywood and television have done to the accents and humor of the era is representative—shows like Hee Haw and so on. They do, in fact, overplay the people—out of a sense of cultural superiority, I suppose. At any rate, the truth is, allowing for all that, mountain folk did look and live pretty much that way at one time.”

  “Except for the notion that political correctness is ‘natural,’ I agree. Is there anything you can tell me about the descendents of those folks still in the hills that will help me find a murderer?”

  “Well, they are still pretty close-mouthed. Outsiders will not find it easy to get information, and they still distrust the police. They’d rather see to things themselves.”

  “I’d need an insider to crack that?”

  “And not a policeman, yes.”

  “Then I have a problem.”

  Their lunch arrived. Weitz seemed to want to ask Ike something and twice started to speak, then shook his head and resumed dipping into his soup.

  “Ask it,” Ike said, amused at the academic’s indecision.

  “It’s none of my business, Sheriff—”

  “Ike. Everyone calls me Ike.”

  “Thank you. Leon, then. Ike, you and Dr. Harris, ah…How do I ask this…?”

  “Let me guess. Are we what the rumors suppose? That help?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. There’re faculty members who have this inane notion that the intelligentsia should not be seen fraternizing with the hoi polloi, mere mortals, you might say.”

  “Except when they seduce their students, but of course, that doesn’t count any more than an eighteenth-century squire impregnating a milkmaid.”

  “Yes, there’s that, too, I suppose.”

  “You can report the following: the sheriff, tugging respectfully at a forelock and shuffling his feet, eyes downcast, begs their lordship’s collective pardon, and suggests, respectfully, that they get a life.”

  Weitz grinned. “I’ll do that. Sorry, but I promised I’d ask.’”

  “Since we’ve opened up the area of reporting back to our side the activities of the other side, there is something you can do for me. What can you tell me about Brent Wilcox’s relations with the faculty?”

  “Ah, that’s something I am happy to talk about. He has a following in the group that, by the way, is most concerned about your bona fides, they are…Let me start again. Except for the men and women in the business school, faculty members are incredibly naïve when it comes to business and money. We deny it, of course, because we think we are smarter than people. Wilcox has caught the fancy of some of them because of his presumptive knowledge of real estate and land brokerage. They are looking for some windfall income by investing in something called the New Options Investments.”

  “He is recruiting investors?”

  “Yes, no…I think so. I would assume they will surface soon enough.”

  “Leon, I will happily keep your nosey friends posted on my relationship with their president, within the bounds of decency and discretion, of course, if you will keep me posted on Wilcox. Oh, and don’t buy in yourself. He’s a scam artist.”

  “Hadn’t planned to. I am smart enough to know when I’m not smart enough to know, if you follow me. I will keep you posted. There’s no need to reciprocate at your end. Their fertile imaginations will serve them better than the truth.”

  Ike said goodbye and left wondering what new can of worms he’d just opened, and if he might end up having to arrest the mayor.

  Chapter 21

  Sam expected a call from Ike. None came. That left her both disappointed and relieved. On the one hand she thought no call meant she might not rank high enough in his mind to warrant a “how’re you doing?” On the other hand, if he had called, she would be duty bound to tell him about Cutthroat and Karl. The thought of Karl sent her back to her tissues. She blew her nose and called the office. Billy Sutherlin answered. “Hey Ryder, what’s up with you? You got the ‘blue-flu’?”

  “Is Ike there?”

  “Nah, he’s off to a meeting with one of them faculty dudes, probably trying to get the low-down on Ms. Harris.”

  “Billy, forget that. President Harris is a really nice lady and Ike—well, he’s lucky she sees something in him.”

  “He’s lucky? You women always stick together. So, when are you coming back?”

  Good question. She knew she needed to get back to work, to put Karl out of her mind. “I’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “Okay, that’s good. Say, now that you owe me, I want to get down to Talladega for the NASCAR meet. I need you to cover one day for me.”

  “No problem.”

  “It’s a weekend, Ryder. It might interfere with your love life.”

  “And I said no problem. You just plan on having a big time inhaling exhaust fumes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You heard me. Put Essie on, will you?” Sam needed to talk to a woman. Essie was the closest one available. Essie listened for a minute and whooped something about a jelly-filled.

  ***

  Before he left Picketsville for Harvard and a different life, Ike had his hair cut at Melvin Cushwa’s barbershop on Main Street. Everybody did. It was the only barbershop in town. There were five chairs—the old-fashioned kind that had the big adjustable bolster on the back where you could rest your head while the effects of a hot towel worked their magic on your face and soul. Mel and four other men honed their straight edge razors on leather strops, applied hot lather with badger hair brushes, and gave everybody the identical haircut. When he returned to Picketsville, Ike discovered Melvin had retired to Florida, the other men had drifted away, and a Pakistani who talked too much and giggled had assumed ownership of the shop. One haircut by Pradesh convinced Ike he needed an alternative.

  He’d discovered Lee Henry quite by accident. She was in the Shop n’ Save when he stopped in for some ground beef and hamburger rolls. He’d just had his hair cut and she happened to look up from a conversation she was having with several of her cronies. She frowned and shook her head. “Mmm, mmm, mmmmmm! That there is the worst mess I ever saw on the top of a man’s head in a long time. You need help, honey.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “I do. Question is, short of driving to Roanoke, where will I find it?”

  “You come see me. I’ll see if I can fix that disaster.” She dug a crumpled business card from her purse and handed it to him. “Don’t wait too long, sugar.” She turned to her companions and Ike heard her murmur, “He’s been done by that Indin.”

  A week later, he pulled into her driveway. Her house had started out as a split-level but the area usually assigned as a utility room had been expanded to the rear and was fitted out like a salon. Not a barber shop. There were no chairs raised by pedaling hydraulics, no men’s magazines lying about. Just shelves loaded with shampoos and conditioners, brushes with wide-spaced, knobby teeth and the perpetual odor of wet hair. If he had any second thoughts about using Lee, however, they were immediately dismissed by her raucous personality and endless optimism. She cut hair for men and women. “I’m unisex,” she’d said. “That means I only do it with one guy at a time.” And she’d bubbled over with the kind of laughter that would do more
good in a hospital than an entire pharmaceutical company. She told stories, the latest gossip, and jokes. She and Ike struck up a friendship that became an important part of his life. When she finally kicked her alcoholic and abusive husband out, Ike was there to console. He sometimes would drop in “for a trim” simply to get away from the dark side of his life.

  Today, he needed a haircut.

  “Well, look at what come in with the north wind. Say, Ike, you must be feeling right at home with all this snow since you lived up north all them years.”

  “This isn’t a snow, Lee. This is a dusting. A real snow is when it piles up to your hips.”

  “Well, I don’t ever want to see no real snow then. Sit down, put your feet on the foot rest thingy, and let me get to work.” She tucked a vinyl sheet around his neck and spritzed his hair.

  “Okay,” she said, and Ike knew he was in for the story. “Did you hear about the Tices’ daughter and her car?”

  “No, what about her?”

  “This is a true story, Ike. Swear to God. Georgie Tice gave little Tiffani—that’s with an ‘I’ instead of a ‘Y’ and a little heart instead of a dot over the ‘I’. He gave her a Ford Mustang when she turned eighteen. Not a new one but nice, you know. Lordy me, the times I had in a Mustang…my, my…Well, anyway, she’d been away to college over in Charlottesville and came home for the weekend. Drove home, mind you, in the ’Stang. She pulls up and old Georgie hears the worst noise you can imagine. Bangity, bang, bang. He runs out and that old Mustang is jumping and rocking. It sounds like the rods and lifters are about ready to fly out the top of the engine. She pops out all gushy and such and George just stands there. Then he goes to check the car to see what’s wrong. She comes back for her bags and the car’s about to shake apart. He says, ‘Tiffani, you see this oil pressure gauge? It’s dead on zero.’ And she says, ‘Oh that. Don’t you pay no attention to that old thing, Daddy. It ain’t worked for weeks.’” Lee burst into her patented laugh. “Cost him twenty-five hundred dollars for a new engine and he made her go to the Vo-Tech at night and take an auto mechanics course before he’d let her drive again. Ain’t that a scream?” She put the electric trimmers to work on the back of his neck. “So what’s new in the policing business? You got any juicy stuff for me?”

  “You know more about what’s going on in the Sheriff’s Office than I do. You tell me.”

  “Well, there’s the body you took out of the woods a while back. Anything new there?”

  “How’d you hear about it?”

  “I got other customers ’sides you, Handsome. Picketsville is a small town. We don’t have much in the way of secrets here.”

  “Nobody’s supposed to know about that.”

  “No? Too late on that one.”

  “What else?”

  “Mavis Bowers told me she was out that way the night before. I don’t know what that woman was doing out there in the middle of the night. Getting out of the house, I expect. Her husband is a hard shell Baptist and she’s an E-whiskey-palian and needs a pick-me-up every now and then. I expect she slipped out for a nip, bless her heart.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Oh yeah, she said she saw a truck parked on the side of the road. Not likely it was kids slipping into the woods to get it on—too cold—so it must have been someone else.”

  “Did she say what kind of truck?”

  “No. Mavis doesn’t know about vehicles.”

  “But you do.”

  “Twelve years living with an alcoholic over-the-road trucker—I do.” She combed his hair and trimmed his eyebrows. “Got a jungle started there, Ike. Means you’re getting old.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. What do you hear about Brent Wilcox?”

  “Oh, now you got a good one. What do you want to know?”

  “Anything I can’t pull off the internet.”

  “Let’s see. Where to start? He’s been out to the old Craddock place a time or two. It don’t seem likely he’s interested in any of them girls, so it must be something else has caught his eye. And then he’s been moving all around town asking questions about folks—you especially. Why is that, do you suppose?”

  “Probably because I’m the guy who’s most likely to bust him. He would not like that to happen.”

  “He’s been squiring Agnes Ewalt around.”

  That was news and definitely not good news. Agnes was too close to Ruth. Ike pushed away the images that struggled to form in his mind.

  Agnes and Wilcox!

  Chapter 22

  Andover Crisp had a problem. In fact he had a whole laundry list of problems. It had not been his idea to extract Kamarov from Novosibirsk in the first place. That had come down from the director’s office. One of his know-it-all recruits sold him on the idea and he ordered the black ops division to go in and bring the Russian spook out. Only then had Crisp received orders to make the damn-fool operation work. Nobody had the sense to find out what the man did or did not know. He’d promised something on 9-11 but hadn’t as yet produced anything that couldn’t have been gleaned from the internet, if you knew where to look. He did have some interesting things to say about a deep sleeper in the CIA a while back. The sleeper had been on station for a dozen years and moved into a very sensitive area and done considerable damage to the Agency’s missions. A number of field operatives had their cover blown. It was useful information, but…putting together Cutthroat, including the extraction, had cost the Bureau a cool ten million, none of it logged on the budget, which meant a whole lot of departments were going to buy a whole lot of non-existent paperclips. And the end wasn’t in sight. Now the Russian had flown the coop. No one knew where or why he went. Crisp’s only hope of recovering the asset was to follow the money and hope Kamarov wasn’t as clever as he’d come to believe.

  The director had started calling him at home and in the middle of the night. That’s how it began. When the director decides to dump someone—he starts calling in the middle of the night. Then memos appear in your email. Memos you never saw or wrote. Of course, the idiot who thought up this Looney Tunes operation would be insulated from any responsibility. The only bright spot Crisp could see was that the idiot would be promoted and then the next moronic operation to emanate from on top would land in his lap.

  The phone rang. The director?

  “Crisp here.”

  “He’s on the move again.”

  “Where?”

  “He seems to be headed south on I-77 toward Charlotte. He’s using one of his credit cards to take cash advances from ATMs.”

  “Why the credit card? Why not the bank card? All the big money is in the bank. He’ll need the credit card later.”

  “Can’t say, sir. Here’s something else. He used a different card to book into a motel near I-81 last night.”

  “Motel? What the devil is going on here? Shut down the credit cards. Make him use the bank card. I don’t want those bills coming in—not at the rate he’s running them up.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything else?”

  “That’s all for now, Kevin, thank you.”

  Crisp pushed his chair back and steepled his fingers under his chin. Something did not fit. What had he missed? He closed his eyes. He needed to think. He lit a cigar—a definite no-no in the new director’s tenure, but Crisp and his unit were out in the country and there would be no nicotine police to tattle on him. He breathed in contraband Cuban smoke and closed his eyes. Something…what? He ran through the few facts he had. He wondered if there might be another interpretation to them that he might have overlooked. He sat, eyes closed and fingertips together, for a long time. His secretary came into the office, recognized the posture, and left. Finally, he emerged from his reverie and picked up the phone.

  “Kevin, I have another assignment for you. I want you to search again for John Does. You’re to stay cloaked, you understand? I don’t want anybody to know we’re looking. Hack into police department computers if you have to, for unidentified men, bodies,
whatever, and call me back if you find something. Oh, and concentrate on the greater Richmond area particularly.”

  Was it possible Kamarov was already dead and consigned on some departmental blotter as just another derelict? Did he traipse off to Richmond to get laid again and end up mugged in an alley instead? Did some bimbo strip him of his cards and leave him in the gutter—another homeless man with no ID—now just a body cooling in the morgue? That scenario would solve at least half of Crisp’s problems. He rubbed his hands together, whether in anticipation or hope, he wasn’t sure.

  ***

  Whaite stopped at the volunteer fire station and greeted the men on duty. He recognized some of their names but none well. Returning to the mountain had not been a trip down memory lane. His childhood had been hard. Not that his parents were abusive—on the contrary—but they worked a hardscrabble farm that barely put food on the table. As soon as he was able, Whaite started working at the Exxon station. There, he learned the basics of auto mechanics. The meager wages he earned, he handed over to his mother, who would peel off a dollar or two for him to keep. The farm finally failed and his folks moved on to Baltimore to work construction. Whaite stayed on the mountain looking after the house and working at the gas station until he heard about the police academy and a chance to step up in the world. Picketsville needed a deputy and would sponsor him. He snapped at it. He’d served under Sheriff Loyal Parker for a few years. Parker was a bully and knew less about police work than anyone in the office. Ike’s election came at just the right time. Whaite had already started a job search when Ike took over.

  There wasn’t much to be learned from the crew on duty. They told him that by the time they got a call and made it to Bolt’s house, the roof had already collapsed. They shut down and sat out the fire. The only job left for them to do was keep it from jumping to the trees and starting something in the forest.