2 Bidding On Death

by Joyce Harmon

  Two minutes later, the phone rang. It was Maguire. “You wanted me to call?”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner,” I said.

  “Never mind that, what do you want to tell me?”

  “The murder weapon,” I blurted. “It was the iron.”

  “No,” Maguire said. “Forensics checked the iron. It had Jackson’s fingerprints all over it, no blurs, and a lot of dust. They tell me it probably hadn’t been touched since she retired.”

  “Not that iron,” I replied. “The other one. The one that wasn’t there.”

  “She had two irons? Why would anyone want two irons?”

  “The other one wasn’t an iron-iron, not an appliance, I mean. It was for show, an old antique sad iron.”

  “If it wasn’t there, how do you know about it?” Maguire asked. She sounded skeptical.

  I went through my thought processes with my row of books and Rose’s row of books. “And I realized that nobody would have half a shelf of books without a bookend, so I called Rose’s cleaning lady and she told me about the sad iron. Those are plenty heavy, it’s the weight and heat that presses out the wrinkles.”

  “I suppose it’s possible…” Maguire mused. I still hadn’t convinced her.

  “Oh,” I just remembered. “And it was green. Bethany said that Rose painted it. Called it John Deere green. You know, like the tractors.”

  A grunt of surprise. I think that was the clincher. “That’s it, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “It appears likely,” she admitted. “Thank you for the information.”

  I got off the phone and whirled back to Jack, pumping a victory fist. “The kid’s still got it.”

  “Way to go, slugger. But does it get us any further along?”

  I sighed. “Probably not. Not unless they find it. But it makes the murder sounds unpremeditated, doesn’t it?”

  “Which means there’s someone around here capable of a killing rage,” Jack told me soberly. “And now he’s got something to hide. Hon, I wish you’d go easy on the curiosity for a while. It could get you into trouble.”

  I tried to picture someone grabbing an iron and braining a person with it. Someone maybe I knew. It was a creepy thought.

  Jack gave me a hug. It was soothing. Then he said into my hair, “As I was saying – what’s for dinner?”

  TEN

  The next day, I called Julia and asked her to come over with Beau. Paco needed to learn company manners. Beau was an obedience champ and a certified therapy dog; he was mellow. It made him a great training foil for the excitable little brat. We set to work in the backyard. Craig was at the picnic table with a sandwich and a bag of chips. He was reading a Zane Grey, but soon put it down to watch our endeavors.

  I got Paco and put him in his harness and leash and we went out to the backyard, where Julia was waiting with Beau. As I expected, Paco went ballistic. It took a few minutes to get his attention, but it gradually dawned on him that I was the lady with the treat bag. (I brought a boatload of treats for this occasion.) His clever little doggy brain recalled that he could get treats by doing what I wanted and he just had to figure out what it was.

  It was a gradual process. I had Paco walk at my side while Beau and Julia were on the other side of the yard. I kept a treat in my hand and kept him focused on that, giving him frequent treats for behaving. Pretty soon, he got so he could walk nicely within sight of Beau. We brought the dogs closer as we walked them around.

  “You know,” Julia said as we walked, “Rose could have done this any time. Paco didn’t have to be such a menace.”

  “You see that a lot,” I said. “People get dogs and then they just have dogs, and they figure that the dogs are just that way and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

  I put Paco on a sit-stay while Julia walked around us with Beau. Then we traded places. Paco had several eruptions of fury, but each one was shorter, and I got his attention back to Treat Lady faster.

  Then we put both dogs on a down stay. They were side by side about ten feet apart. I stayed close to Paco, watching for the tell-tale signs that he was about to break his stay, but he was good. We both returned to our dogs and I gave Paco treats and praise.

  “Let’s end on a high note,” Julia suggested.

  “Yeah, I think we’re wearing out the little guy,” I agreed.

  Craig got up from the picnic table and gathered up his trash. “I oughta get back,” he said slowly. He nodded toward Paco. “Really something how much he’s learned just while I was sitting here. Ladies. Little hombre.”

  He nodded again and limped off toward the barn.

  Julia turned to me, eyes wide. “Hey, do you think – “

  I elbowed her and made shushing motions. “Yeah, I think,” I said softly. “Already working on it.”

  We headed back into the house, Julia chuckling. “You’re such a matchmaker.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” I settled down at the kitchen table, prepared for a good gab.

  “Not at all. And as far as matches go, this one looks ideal. Why didn’t we think of it sooner?”

  “Craig is easy to overlook,” I admitted. “He just sort of blends in.”

  Julia sighed romantically. “A boy and his dog. It’s a classic.” Suddenly she laughed.

  “What?”

  She helped herself to the coffeepot. “Oh, I was just remembering your most notable matchmaking fumble.”

  I put my head down on the table. “Don’t remind me. How embarrassing.”

  Julia brought us both coffee and settle down, still chuckling.

  “Come on,” I said, “It made sense at the time. Rob Witloof was single and Doc Harding was single, and they seemed compatible. At least it seemed that way to me. I thought she and Delores were just roomies! You know, pals sharing living expenses.”

  “The matching rings should have given you a clue,” Julia told me.

  “I’ve paid a lot more attention since then,” I admitted. “Anyway. Paco needs a home, and Craig has a home. I thought that ‘little hombre’ was very encouraging, didn’t you?”

  “Very,” Julia agreed.

  We heard the crunch of gravel and the dog alarm went off, as Polly raced to the back door. I looked out the window. “It’s Luther,” I said.

  “Ladies,” he greeted us as I opened the door and let him in. Polly squirmed around and Paco raced to confront Luther, barking hysterically.

  “Another training opportunity,” Julia reminded me. Fortunately, Luther is a dog owner (he and his Jack Russell were in obedience class with Polly and me) and an easy-going kind of guy. He agreeably went out and reentered the door a number of times while I distracted Paco with treats and praised him for not being a pest.

  When things settled down, Luther accepted coffee and joined us at the table. “I’m back on the case,” he told us. “The VBI has lead, but I’m assisting.”

  “Great!” I told him sincerely.

  “That tip you gave Agent Maguire convinced her she needed more local knowledge,” he explained. “You hit the nail on the head with that one; green paint chips in the wound. Now we’ve just got to find that old iron.”

  “I’m sure having you back will help the case,” I assured him.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he confessed. “I’m back on the case because Maguire thinks the murder had nothing to do with Granny’s auction. From what she’s learned about Rose and now identifying the weapon as coming from the crime scene, she’s come to the conclusion that Rose just got on somebody’s last nerve and they snapped.”

  “If she’s going to investigate everyone that Rose aggravated over the past thirty and more years, she’ll be here forever,” Julia exclaimed.

  “Well, I haven’t let go of the auction theory,” Luther told us. “It’s the only way to explain the other break-ins. I’m going to go visit Gran tomorrow, see if she can remember something that someone might want. She said there was nothing in that bunch of stuff she didn’t mind seeing the last of
, but I just want to double-check.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table. “She might just not know something was valuable,” I suggested. I described the glasses at the auction that I considered valueless because they’d been worth a nickel apiece thirty years ago.

  “That’s sort of why I wondered if you’d like to come visit Gran with me,” Luther admitted.

  “Me?! Sure!” I so wanted to meet the golfing granny. But I wondered. “Luther, does Agent Maguire know about this?”

  “No,” he said shortly.

  “Would you get in trouble if she did?”

  An uncomfortable pause. “Maybe,” he admitted.

  “Tell you what,” Julia said briskly. “We’ll meet you there.”

  “We?” I asked her.

  “I’m older than you are,” she reminded me. “I could very well be exploring the possibility of assisted living. You’re coming along to keep me company, and we happen to run into Luther there and visit with his Granny.”

  It was lame, but Maguire couldn’t prove it wasn’t true. So we agreed to meet the next day.

  I told Jack about the upcoming road trip as we were getting ready for bed. He wasn’t pleased. “You’re sticking your neck out again, Cis. You really want to get this guy’s attention?”

  “How would he even find out about it?” I pointed out.

  “We don’t know, because we don’t know who it is, right?”

  “You don’t think it’s Luther, do you?!”

  “Of course not. But you know this place, word gets around.”

  “I’ll call Julia and tell her not to tell anyone. Luther won’t mention it, because it’s kind of an end run around the VBI.”

  “And another thing,” he unfairly went on, “when you’re running around, who’s minding the shop?”

  “Well… you are.”

  “Right!” he said, as if I was proving his point. “Last time you went haring around with Luther, I got pulled out of the lab three times by the shop bell. I’m trying to blend the cabernet, still haven’t got it right.”

  “We are getting more traffic in the shop, aren’t we?” That was a good thing. We made most of our sales on-site, from tourists and locals.

  “We sure are. The county is growing and so is wine tourism. But someone needs to be here to sell them the wine!”

  “Well, when I’m here, you think I’m not getting pulled away from my own work to run the shop? I bring in an income here too, you know!”

  “I never said you didn’t, hon,” Jack said, bringing down the emotional temperature. “And before you say it, no I do not think your work is less important. But we need to keep the shop covered. Maybe we should make up a schedule, work out who’s got shop duty when. We’ve just left it ad hoc up to now, and we’re really getting too busy for that.”

  The schedule suggestion reminded me of our past failed attempts to maintain a chores schedule. And that reminded me of my recent solution. “Orrrrr – maybe it’s time we hired a shop manager.”

  Jack had been about to make another point, but closed his mouth. Finally he said, “That’s something to think about. We’re really not a little hobby winery anymore, are we?”

  “Let’s sleep on it,” I suggested. And so we did. Eventually.

  It felt like old times to be off with Julia to ask total strangers a bunch of nosy questions. Julia drove and I rode shotgun. She obviously felt the same way, treating me to a cracked and off-key rendition of On The Road Again until I begged her to stop.

  “Oh, all right,” she said reluctantly. “But isn’t it nice to be doing something, and not waiting around for The Authorities to take care of things, which they obviously aren’t doing?”

  “That sounds dangerously like vigilantism,” I cautioned.

  “If I’d come home when that creep was breaking into my house, you would have seen me go vigilante all over his ass,” she boasted.

  “Oh, don’t!” I begged. “Remember, that might have been what happened to Rose!”

  “Ouch.” She was silent for a few moments, other than muttering to the eighteen wheeler hogging the left lane on the interstate.

  When she spoke again, it was to ask, “What do you think of the auction theory? That the murder is connected to the break-ins?”

  I thought about it, and concluded, “If not the auction, what is the motive? Three break-ins on the same day and one with murder included? If the auction didn’t drive the break-ins, what did?”

  “I know,” Julia said. “That’s probably why I like the theory. I don’t want to think I have anything else in common with Rose, other than that we both hauled a lot of boxes home from the auction.”

  “The only thing is, whatever the house-breaker was looking for must have been really valuable,” I argued. “Because that box of Ruba Rombic that Amy has is worth a few thousand at least, all together, and that wasn’t touched. And if something is that valuable, how could nobody know what it is?”

  “That’s the problem, all right,” Julia admitted.

  I watched the road signs and looked at the directions I’d printed out from Yahoo Maps. “We exit in ten miles.”

  Julia shivered. “I’m not looking forward to this,” she admitted. “ ‘Assisted living’, brrrr.”

  “Luther says it’s nice. And his gran seems to like it.”

  “We’ll just see about that,” she said darkly.

  But when we pulled up to visitor parking at Hallowdale Manor, I wondered if we’d taken a wrong turn and wound up at a country club. The sight of the rolling greens and bustling golf carts in the distance reinforced the image.

  “Wow,” said Julia weakly. “How much does this cost, you suppose?”

  “No idea.”

  We got out of the car and entered the lobby of the main building, where we found Luther talking to a tiny older woman who was wearing a beach cover-up and briskly toweling her short white crop.

  “Come meet my gran!” Luther called to us.

  His gran slapped him. “Heavens, Luther, I’m not decent. Let me run change and I’ll meet you in the dining room.” She gave us a wave and scurried away with a briskness I could only envy.

  “Well!” Julia was impressed. “She certainly seems – fit.” Julia was probably twenty years younger than Lacey.

  “Fitter than I’ve ever seen her,” Luther replied. “She used to wear those print house dresses and just potter around the house, you know. There’s a lot to do here, and she’s jumped in feet first.”

  In a few minutes, Lacey joined us, wearing white shorts that displayed surprisingly shapely legs. “Come on, kids,” she told us, “tee time in two hours.”

  “Tea right after lunch?” Julia murmured to me.

  “Tee eee eee,” I murmured back, spelling it out. “As in golf.”

  “Oh, right.”

  We followed Lacey into the dining room, where she led us to a table by the windows. “I do a lot of cooking in my own condo,” she told us as we deployed menus. “But this is the place to bring guests. Someone else does the dishes and the food is really good.”

  It was also the most extensively footnoted menu I’d ever seen, with hearts and stars and arrows, and a legend at the bottom to explain which selections were heart-healthy, which were recommended for diabetics, and a whole host of other medical concerns.

  I got the bison burger and sweet potato fries. Julia went for the whole wheat spaghetti. Lacey opted for the egg-white omelet, and told Luther, who went with the baby back ribs, that it was never too early to start thinking about his cholesterol.

  “This from the woman who served me chicken-fried steak with sausage gravy my whole life,” he grumbled.

  “I didn’t know any better,” Lacey said.

  We chowed down. The conversation consisted mostly of appreciative grunts. When we reached the last few bites and were slowing down, Lacey brought us back to business. “Now,” she said, as if calling a meeting to order. “Luther tells me you folks think someone got murdered over something from my est
ate sale.”

  “That’s the theory we’re working on,” Julia said. “Three houses were broken into two days later, and they were all people who’d bought a lot at the auction.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Lacey said.

  “What can you tell us about the house and contents?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It was a farmhouse. I married Paul in ’49, and his family had been there for a hundred years. But it was just an old farmhouse. The Beaumonts were well-off by local standards, but nobody ever called them rich.”

  “Did you regret leaving?” I wondered.

  “Not really,” Lacey said. “It was a nice house, especially when the kids were young. Plenty of room, you know? But Paul died in ’77, and I stayed on. There wasn’t much for me to do around there, I rented out the acreage to a neighbor and he farmed it. But one day last year, suddenly it just hit me. Paul had been sentimental about the place, but that didn’t mean that I was. I looked around and asked around, and realized that none of my kids or grandkids had any notion of living there themselves. All that stuff would just be sold after I was gone, so why spend the rest of my life tending a family heritage that no living person wanted anymore?”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Julia. “Carpe diem.”

  “There was some old glassware that our friend Amy expects to make a few thousand on,” I mentioned. I couldn’t get over that Ruba Rombic.

  “Well, good for her,” Lacey said.

  “Do you wish you’d known that those were valuable?” I persisted.

  “Honey, there was a house full of stuff,” Lacey said. “I looked it over and kept what I wanted. If I’d researched everything before letting it go to auction, I’d still be there working through it, and for quite a while to come. If anyone got a windfall out of the auction, that’s fine, because I didn’t want to fool with it.”

  “What could we have missed?” Julia wondered, frustrated. “I would have thought with both Amy and Rose there, anything really valuable would have been spotted and snapped up.”