Antiques Frame

by Barbara Allan

  You are correct if you have already deduced that I knew all about the PocketFinder and my dear deluded daughter’s attempt to follow my tracks. When I recently perused a certain issue of the AARP magazine—why on earth do they insist on sending it to me!—I discovered that someone had circled the GPS apparatus with a pen. Since I doubted that Sushi had done it, that left little Brandy.

  I, of course, didn’t know when she might plant it on me, although just the other day I’d spotted her snatching a small package from the mail and spiriting it away. And then her little smug smile this morning provided all the confirmation I needed. (She telegraphs everything. It’s a little late to mention this, but if parenthetical asides rub you the wrong way, you’re reading the wrong book.)

  I do have to give the girl credit for hiding the thingie in my coat lining, though I, of course, soon found and removed it, then placed the device on the floor beneath my seat. The PocketFinder would have a gay (in the traditional sense) old time riding the trolley around and around all day long! Let’s see who’s smirking now.

  The trolley made its first downtown stop at the courthouse, a beautiful Grecian structure—Brandy has termed it rococo, but she’s wrong—within which the people who work there all want air-conditioning and keep trying to get the building torn down and replaced with something modern . Not on my watch! (The courthouse employees have been quiet of late. Things always settle down in the winter months, when the old furnace is chugging along nicely.)

  After tossing Vera a cheery “Toodles,” I disembarked, then hoofed it over two blocks to Hunter’s Hardware, which I knew would already be open, because farmers get up at dawn, while even the roosters are still snoozing, to head into town for supplies (the farmers, not the roosters).

  Hunter’s was a uniquely Midwestern aberration: the front of the elongated store, which hadn’t been remodeled since women wore bustles, retained its original tin ceiling and hardwood floor, yet the business carried everything one might expect of a contemporary hardware store. But in the back of the place was a bar offering hard liquor to hardworking men who stopped in for hardware, plus some not so hardworking men who liked hard liquor, too.

  Perhaps it’s no big surprise that the best-selling drink at Hunter’s was the screwdriver, which allowed guilt-ridden patrons to honestly tell their significant others that they’d stopped in for one.

  The proprietors were a middle-aged couple named Junior and Mary, who bought the business some years back with money Mary got from something that happened that I’m not allowed to mention anymore, or even hint at. (But you can read our earlier books to find out, as those volumes predate the injunction that spoiled our fun.)

  Where was I? Ah, yes—the proprietors. Junior ran the bar, and Mary took care of the hardware customers, but recently she had put her foot down, not the prosthesis one, (newbies will just have to go back and read those earlier titles) and told Junior to find someone to replace her: she was staying home to watch her stories and game shows.

  Enter Vivian. I recommended fellow trolley traveler Billy Buckly, who I knew was looking for work. He is the town’s most popular and most famous little person (also its only little person) and had married the widow Snodgrass after a romance blossomed on the trolley when it braked suddenly and he flew through the air and landed in her lap. (He was from a long line of acrobats on his mother’s side, going back to the original Barnum & Bailey Circus, and there are those who suspect he’d hit his target.) Anyway, although the widow Snodgrass was comfortable (both her lap and her bank account), Billy craved gainful employment (“I’m not cut out to be a kept man,” he would say), and Junior took my advice and hired him.

  But two problems presented themselves for Billy while running the hardware section: he couldn’t reach anything on a shelf higher than five feet, and his stature sometimes made it hard for customers to spot him. So when Billy suddenly appeared from around a display or popped up on the stool behind the counter, he would occasionally startle a patron. There were those with heart conditions who complained of Billy-inspired palpitations.(I suggested to my friend that he might wear jingle bells on his shoes, by way of warning, which didn’t go over so well; for a while he stopped speaking to me.)

  On the other hand, Billy was a good-natured whiz at his work, and a considerable step up (so to speak) from the sour, lackadaisical Mary.

  My destination was the bar area, and I breezed through the front of the store, not seeing Billy, although that didn’t mean he wasn’t around somewhere.

  I found Junior polishing tumblers behind a well-scarred bar that could have told more stories than even moi. He was a paunchy, rheumy-eyed, mottled-nosed man in his late sixties, who all too obviously had spent his career frequently sampling his own liquid wares.

  Sliding up on a torn leather stool, I said, “Fine morning, don’t you think? Brisk!”

  “’Lo, Viv,” he replied. “Yeah, nice ’n’ brisk. The usual?”

  My usual was a Shirley Temple, a result of my learning the hard way that hard liquor doesn’t mix with my medication. (A case in point is Kalamazoo, where once I found myself with no memory of how I’d arrived. Or why.)

  “Too brisk outside for that, Junior,” I said. “Give me a hot toddy, and hold the toddy.” Which was basically hot tea with honey and lemon.

  While making my alcohol-free libation, he said, “Glad to hear your girl Brandy is out of the clink. Nobody really thought she killed that gal, anyway. I bet you’re working on the case, though. Any leads yet?”

  “Nothing so far,” I said as he set the steaming glass tumbler in front of me.

  “Say . . . did you hear about that jewelry store robbery in the Quad Cities?”

  Since I didn’t want to know about that, I said rather curtly, “Not interested.”

  “Since when doesn’t crime interest you?”

  “Too far off my beat.”

  This might (or might not) have hurt Junior’s feelings, but I was not here to converse with him. He made a decent toddy-less toddy and was the best Shirley Temple man in town, but otherwise, he was less a help and more a hindrance in any investigation. Junior had simply lost too many brain cells to be a worthwhile snitch.

  That left Henry, the only other patron in the bar, seated three stools down.

  Henry was Hunter’s perpetual stool warmer. Pushing sixty, slender, with silver hair and a beak nose, he had been a prominent surgeon, but his career had come to an abrupt halt when he botched an operation after taking a shot of whiskey to steady his nerves just beforehand. The patient recovered but was missing a kidney instead of the intended appendix. Henry had lost his license and had even done a little time.

  Over the years Junior and I had tried to get Henry off the sauce, sometimes meeting with success, other times not. Our most recent victory was having Junior serve him nonalcoholic beer (oddly, Henry’s speech remained slurred). This success became a “not,” when Henry got wise to the ruse and went back on the hard stuff.

  And yet, on the wagon or off, Henry was always my go-to informant, seated as he was quietly at the bar all day, soaking up not just booze but information, as he took in all the conversation around him while others ignored his presence, since he seemed as much a fixture as the scarred counter itself. And a paucity of brain cells seemed not to be problem.

  I slid down a stool, keeping a vacancy between us.

  “And how is Henry today?” I asked cheerfully.

  He looked my way with bloodshot eyes. “Henry’s hunky-dory.”

  “And isn’t that a wonderful way to be.” Never paid to pepper the man with questions right out of the gate, so I just sat there, quietly sipping my hot drink.

  “That was a real s’rpise,” Henry slurred.

  “What was, dear?”

  “That she went in th’ bidness.”

  “Who, dear?”

  “Chief’s wife. Antique shop, downtown.” He shook his head.

  Of course, Henry was unaware that Phil Dean had been picking up the tab.

>   “Th’ bidness is reaaal bad,” he was saying.

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “Show of yours.” Henry talked in a kind of shorthand, but I could follow it.

  I said, “Yes, I suppose the popularity of our show has helped keep the customers coming into our establishment.”

  “Kill the Wagners.”

  “Yes, well, the Wagners went under after mixing in reproductions with authentic antiques. No one likes to be fooled, dear.”

  The practice of combining craft items with antiques, though acceptable these days, rubs me the wrong way, too. Be one kind of store or the other, I say!

  Henry paused between sips. “Kleins just hangin’ on.”

  I nodded. “I admit I thought Gerald and Loretta had bitten off more than they could chew when they relocated to that big building. But with their auction sideline, they seem to be keeping their heads well above water.”

  “Net.”

  All right, sometimes the shorthand was too much for me.

  I asked, “What about a net, dear?”

  “Innernet. Savin’ them.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I suppose one must change with the times.”

  I just hoped Brandy and I would never have to sell our wares on eBay or otherwise online. Neither one of us could wrap a package worth a diddly darn.

  I asked Henry, “Say, has our producer, Phil Dean, ever come in here and warmed a stool?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about the chief’s wife?”

  “Not fit fer females.”

  Well, what was I? Chopped liver?

  I let that pass, however, and asked, “Have any strangers been asking about Phil or Mrs. Cassato . . . or me?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about a man name of Rodney Evans? Ever hear of him, Henry?”

  “Nope.”

  I glanced at the eavesdropping Junior, who just shrugged.

  Since Henry seemed to be a bust in the information department, and I had another matter to attend to, I downed the rest of my hot-sans-toddy, threw a five-spot on the bar, then slid off my stool.

  “Nice seeing you, gents,” I said with a farewell salute, though, frankly, they hadn’t been helpful at all.

  As I passed through the front of the store, I spotted Billy Buckly seated on a stack of catalogs behind the counter at the cash register, and took the time to breeze over.

  Billy was about forty but always looked rather youthful, in part because he shopped in the children’s section at JCPenney.

  “Well,” he said with a big smile. “There’s my benefactress!”

  He seemed over the jingle-bell suggestion.

  “How do you like your new position?” I asked him cheerfully.

  “Well, I love, I love it, love it. Everyone is so friendly!”

  “Wunderbar!” It occurred to me that my friend might be of some use here, because even more than Henry, Billy had his ears closer to the ground than anyone else. (I mean that figuratively, not literally. PC Police, call off your troops!)

  Billy was something of an antiques buff himself, or rather a collectibles enthusiast. His specialty was Wizard of Oz movie material, because of his family connection. But he liked thirties and forties pop culture items in general and was nicely tied into the local collecting community. He was no stranger in the antiques shops and secondhand stores of the area.

  I told Billy that I was looking for a particular picture frame, one that Camilla had bought at Klein’s the day she died, but that seemed to be missing in action.

  “I could ask around,” Billy said, with a shrug. “And let you know if I find out anything.”

  “Thank you, Billy, my boy,” I said, then continued along my way.

  I had arranged a clandestine meeting with Heather, my current police department snitch. Since many of my past informants at the PD had been either fired or relocated after giving me confidential information, I knew the woman would get skittish if I kept her waiting for long. So I shook, shook, shook my booty, making the three-block trek to the Serenity Public Library in record time. Or at least in record time for someone with two hip replacements.

  Usually, Heather and I would meet in the south stairwell of the library’s attached underground parking garage. I had dubbed her “Deep Throat” because of the Woodward and Bernstein movie, until Brandy enlightened me as to what that term actually referred to (I was shocked, if intrigued). Since Heather has a somewhat husky voice, I changed her code name to “Sore Throat,” but perhaps that wasn’t any less of a double entendre.

  With the inclement weather, the garage might be doing a booming business, so earlier I’d suggested that Heather and I converge on the library’s second floor, in the seldom visited literary section (what a shame!).

  I was to go to aisle 821F and stop at book 812.08, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, while Heather would be in the next aisle, 821G, at 839.822, The Collected Ibsen. We would then remove the aforementioned books and talk through the space created in the bookcase.

  Don’t you just love the Dewey decimal system? Well, you should! It was developed in the 1870s by Melvil Dewey, a founding member of the American Library Association. Nowadays, some libraries have abandoned the DDS for other book classification systems—which I find overly complicated—and I have lobbied to make sure our library is not among the unfaithful.

  Still, I couldn’t do anything about it when a computer replaced the library’s grand old oak card catalog. It used to be such fun perusing the little long drawers with their stiff white index cards, through which hundreds and thousands of people over the years, eager for knowledge, had riffled (admittedly, some left cold and flu germs behind, and you sometimes got more than just knowledge).

  I had tried to buy that card-catalog cabinet from the library, because it would be perfect for storing all my little trinkets in, but the library board wouldn’t sell it to me—sour grapes, sez I, after I opposed and helped defeat their expensive proposal for a new library. (The current facility is only thirty years old, and that’s practically a baby in my book of buildings!)

  (Note to Vivian from Editor: Vivian . . . does this have anything to do with anything?)

  (Note to Editor from Vivian: I am painting a picture, of setting, of color, of . . . I know, I know. Get on with the story.)

  After arriving at our prearranged spot, I removed 813.08 from the shelf, and after a moment—I cleared my throat to clue my accomplice in that I was in place—Heather, on the other side, removed 839.822. But her volume was much thicker (Ibsen wrote a lot of plays in his time!), so I had to take out another book in order to create an even-sized hole.

  The only problem now was that Heather was shorter than me, which I hadn’t taken into consideration, and I could see only the top of her head. Since I didn’t want to bend my knees and compromise my replaced hips—nor did I wish to aggravate those knees, since my doctor had been talking about replacing them, as well—I whispered for Heather to stand on a few volumes of Shakespeare, whose works were nearby. I felt sure he wouldn’t mind.

  The top of Heather’s head disappeared, then returned a few moments later, and I could see most of her auburn hair and all of her red-framed glasses.

  “What have you got for me?” I whispered.

  Her eyes looked left, then right.

  (You may wonder why a former dispatcher, promoted to forensics, would take such a chance consorting with me, but Heather had admitted she felt responsible for Brandy’s incarceration by failing to discover the fingerprint evidence, which later the CDC had . . . and once I knew the woman felt guilty, I ran with it!)

  Heather whispered, “Something else the CDC found.”

  “Oh?”

  “There was an unidentified partial print on the corn-husking tool.”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Meaning somebody handled it besides Brandy or Mrs. Klein or Mrs. Cassato.”

  “Did the CDC run the print through AFIS?” I asked. Automated Fingerp
rint Identification System. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, dear?” The “dear” had a bit of an edge to it, I admit.

  Heather shrugged with her eyes. “AFIS doesn’t accept partial prints, because they aren’t admissible in court.”

  “Is there a program that accepts partial prints?”

  “Actually, yes. There’s one designed to create an algorithm that fills in what the rest of the print might be—based on minutia points, chain-code contours, and other patterns. But the results wouldn’t be conclusive.”

  I filed this new information away, then asked, “Do you have access to that program?”

  She hesitated. “Yes. But I don’t see how that could help.”

  “If there is a match—however tenuous—it could point to Camilla Cassato’s killer.” Then I added, “Of course, then it would be up to me to find further evidence that is conclusive.”

  Heather sighed. “Okay. Okay. I owe you and your daughter this much. I’ll run the partial print.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “How long will it take?”

  “A day, maybe two. But that will be the last contact between us, understood, Vivian? On this matter or any other.”

  “No problem,” I replied, as if I really meant it. The old acting chops always come in handy! Anyway, was she kidding? Having a snitch on the forensics team was like striking gold!

  The hole in the bookcase closed as Ibsen slid back into place. That was a lot of plays! Depressing ones, too.

  I was a little bit stymied about what to do with myself for the rest of the afternoon. Henry had been a disappointment, and I had yet to hear back from my New Jersey friend, the don, and now I must wait on a report from Heather.

  Waiting is not my strong suit. Action, action, action! That’s the Vivian Borne way.

  I left the library and perambulated toward Main Street. The sun had come out, melting what little snow there was on the sidewalks, while tiny icicles clung to tree branches drip, drip, dripping to the ground.

  On impulse and a hunch, I crossed the alleyway that ran behind the late Camilla’s store, hesitated, then turned down it, avoiding pothole puddles as I walked.