by M. K. Wren
“I guess that’s why it was such a short ride. The car seems to be all right otherwise, though.”
“Well, that is a relief. I’d certainly hate to have it stripped up, or whatever they call it.”
“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Travers? You ready?” Kleber carefully ignored Conan, even when he fell into step with Steve as he headed for the entry hall.
Conan heard Brian saying to Beryl, “You should’ve told me about your car, Bea. Damn, that’s a hell of a note.”
And her long sigh. “It just seemed…such a trivial thing. I mean…”
She didn’t finish. Everyone knew what she meant.
Chapter 6
“Nye must’ve been trying to save the taxpayers some money when he picked this one,” Steve commented dourly.
Conan nodded, surveying the arc of small, aging cottages. Still, they were freshly painted, the peaked roofs newly shingled, the crescent of lawn as trim as a putting green.
“Noah and Wilma’ll be here in the office, Mr. Travers,” Kleber said as they approached the cottage at the hub of the arc. “Nice folks, the Appletons. Been in Holliday Beach for thirty years. That’s where Nye was staying: number ten.” He pointed to the third cottage from the north end of the semicircle. A Ford sedan was parked in front of it, and a policeman guarded the door.
Inside the office, Noah Appleton was snoring softly in an armchair facing a dark television screen, but his wife was on duty at the counter.
She said in a stage whisper, “Noah! Wake up, for heaven’s sake.” Then with an apple-dumpling smile for Kleber and entourage, “Good morning. Noah runs the night shift here, y’know. Thinks he’s still home in bed.”
But Noah was on his feet now, producing a smile even before his eyes were fully focused.
“Morning, Earl.” Then when Kleber introduced Steve, “Well, now, it’s a real pleasure, Mr. Travers. Anything Wilma and me can do to help out, we’d be proud. Morning, Mr. Flagg. Bet you had to get out your detective badge again.” His knowing laugh garnered a black look from Kleber.
Conan shrugged. “Just tagging along, Mr. Appleton.”
“Sure, sure. Well, Mr. Travers, I guess you’d like to see the cottage where Mr. Nye was staying.”
“Yes, but I’d like to ask you a few questions first. When did Nye check in?”
Appleton had the registration card handy on the counter.
“Let’s see, that was February fifth; last Thursday.”
“Is there a phone in his room?”
“Yep. We’ve got phones in every unit, but they’re extensions; all the calls go through our switchboard here. You’ll want a list of his calls, I expect. Wilma?”
“Here you are.” She produced a file card with a small flourish. “These are just the long-distance calls. We don’t charge for local calls, but any long distance we put through the operator ourselves and get time and charges. Otherwise, we’d be mortgaged to the phone company.”
Steve obligingly laughed, letting Conan study the card over his shoulder before he passed it on to Kleber. The only calls were dated February ninth; yesterday. Three between two and five o’clock all to the same number, then three more between five-thirty and eight to a second number.
“I remember those calls,” Mrs. Appleton declared. “Person-to-person, but Mr. Nye couldn’t seem to get hold of the right person. That first number, now that was the Internal Revenue Service in Portland.”
Steve raised his eyebrows, properly impressed.
“Do you remember the name of the person he was calling?”
“Oh, dear, let’s see now. The first name was Luther. Don’t hear that much these days. But the last name…”
“Dix?” Steve asked tightly.
“Why, sure, that was it. And the other number was for him, too. His home phone, I guess. Must’ve been out to dinner or something. Mr. Nye didn’t get hold of him till—well, there it is. The last call. Eight o’clock.”
“But he did get hold of him? Okay, can you think of anything unusual that happened while Nye was here? Did he have any visitors you noticed, for instance?”
She puffed herself upright. “Sure did. Just last night, in fact. Noah, you better tell him about it.”
Noah seemed to be looking forward to it.
“Well, it was twelve-twenty—I noticed the time because it was late for customers—and this fancy foreign car drives up, rumbling like it had two motors under the hood.”
“A foreign car? Did you notice what make?”
“I wouldn’t know one from another. It was real low; one of them racing types, just room enough for two people, and you wonder how. And it was red. Fire-engine red. Anyhow, the car stops outside here and a woman gets out.”
“Was she driving?”
“No, there was a man driving. Young, dark hair and a mustache; sort of a sporty-looking feller. He got out and opened the car door for her.”
“A gentleman. All right, tell me about the lady.”
“It was the lady who came into the office.” Then with a sly laugh, “I figured that was a real switch, but it turns out she didn’t want a room. Told me her name was Loma Moody Nye—used three names just like that—and she wanted to know what unit her husband was in. Eliot Nye.”
Appleton paused to relish the surprised stares that engendered, then admitted, “Well, now, that sort of took me back, too. She said she come to see Mr. Nye, that it was real important, and she knew he was staying here but didn’t know which unit.”
Steve had recovered himself. “Did you tell her?”
“Well, sure. Didn’t seem any reason not to.” He frowned and asked anxiously, “You don’t suppose them two had anything to do with what happened to Mr. Nye?”
Kleber laughed that off. “Not considering the circumstances, Noah.”
Conan sent him an oblique glance. They didn’t yet know all the circumstances.
“What happened then?” Steve prompted.
“Well, she went back to the car, and they drove off around the circle here to number ten.”
“Did you see them go in?”
“No. I didn’t figure it was any business of mine. Anyhow, I was in the middle of the late movie.”
“Do you know what time it was when they left?”
“’Fraid not. You’d think I would’ve heard that car, but it was raining like heck last night, and what with the TV, well, I never heard when they left. About one, when I was walking over to the house”—he cocked a thumb southward—“I didn’t see the car, so they was gone by then.”
“What about Nye’s car?”
“It was there, right where it’s sitting now.”
“Any lights in his cottage?”
“No, not a one.”
Conan put in casually, “By the way, did Mr. Nye leave his room key with you when he went out last night?”
Appleton seemed a little surprised at the question.
“No, but he never left his key with us, Mr. Flagg. Matter of fact, he hardly ever went out the whole time he was here.”
“What about yesterday? Was he in his room all day?”
Appleton surrendered the floor and the question to his wife, who explained, “I was around cleaning the units or here in the office all day yesterday. I don’t think he went out but once, and that was about suppertime. Maybe six. He didn’t stay long, and when he came back, he was carrying a couple of white sacks, like he’d brought his supper in.”
Steve squinted thoughtfully over that, then asked, “Do you have an extra key for number ten we could use?”
Appleton nodded and rummaged under the counter until he produced a key on a plastic oval.
“Here it is. This is the spare.”
“The only spare?”
“Yes, but we’ve got a master key, so you can keep this one till you’re finished up there.”
“Thanks. We’ll look at the room now, then a lab crew will be over later.”
Kleber took the lead as they crunched across the gravel drive to number ten. He introd
uced Steve to the sergeant guarding the door; Conan he was still trying to ignore. Steve examined the door and lock carefully before opening it; there was no evidence of forced entry. Once inside, he flicked on the wall switch, using the key as a lever.
Conan followed him in and surveyed the room, bleak in the light of the single ceiling fixture, holding on to the night with the shades drawn. There was a peculiarly sterile tidiness about it and few indications of occupancy; the bed hadn’t been touched since it was last made.
He opened the closet where a suit, two fresh shirts, a bathrobe, and pajamas were neatly hung.
“His hat isn’t here.”
Kleber, standing at the door, elbows angling out so he could hook his thumbs in his gun belt, snapped, “You making an inventory of his clothes already?”
Conan responded coolly, “I just want to know what happened to the hat he was wearing last night. It was an odd-looking thing, sort of a tweedy brown cloth; looked like it was handmade.”
When Kleber snorted contemptuously at that, Steve sent him an impatient frown but offered no comment. He was bending over the dresser, which Nye had turned into a desk. Conan went over to look at it. There was a typewriter at one end, an old-fashioned electric adding machine at the other. The space between was uncluttered, only a stapler, a few paperclips, a pencil sharpener, five pencils of various lengths, and a yellow legal pad without a mark on it, or even the ghost of an indentation, although half its pages had been torn out.
Conan knelt with Steve when he opened the attaché case on the floor by the dresser. Inside they found blank IRS forms and bulletins in stultifying variety, a fresh legal pad, and one file folder. Steve opened it, handling it by the edges, and disclosed a sheaf of tax forms and schedules.
He read, “F. Conrad Van Roon, 429 Coast Highway, Holliday Beach. You know him, Conan?”
“Yes. He’s one of the…witnesses. I wonder if this means he’s being audited, too.”
“Could be. Luther Dix ought to know.”
“But will he tell?”
Conan rose and stepped aside for Kleber and, as he surveyed the room once more, felt a warning chill at the back of his neck. He turned the survey into an outright search, looking in the closet again, opening every drawer, even checking under the bed.
Steve was busy with his own search, but Kleber seemed to find Conan’s activities fascinating, finally demanding, “Flagg, just what do you think you’re doing?”
At that point Conan was back at the dresser-desk, scowling down into the wastebasket.
“Looking for something else that’s missing. Steve, look at this wastebasket. Empty.”
Kleber said curtly, “They empty the damn things every day. Maybe Nye just didn’t have anything to throw in it yesterday. Doesn’t look like he was doing any work here with everything laid out so neat.”
“No,” Conan agreed, “it doesn’t look like it, but we know he was here most of the day yesterday, so what was he doing? Chewing up and swallowing the Surf House Restaurant accounts for three years?”
“The what?” That startled inquiry came from Steve.
“Nye took all the records from the restaurant last Thursday and, according to Brian, put them in a box and carted them off to his motel. But they’re not here, nor are the contents of this wastebasket, nor any of the sheets torn off that legal pad; there’s not a note or memo or even a piece of scratch paper with some stray numbers on it in this room. So, what happened? Where are the Surf House records?”
Steve pronounced that another good question, but after a moment, Kleber had an answer for it.
“Somebody walked off with them. The same somebody who killed Nye. That’s why we didn’t find his motel key on the body. Whoever killed him used that key to get in here and grab those records and all that other stuff so there wouldn’t be anything left of them.”
Steve’s response to that was to ask Conan, “Do you know anything about Tally’s problems with the IRS?”
“A little, yes.”
“Everybody in town knows he was having trouble with the IRS,” Kleber put in hotly. “So, maybe he figured he could get himself out of trouble if all his records disappeared while they were in the hands of an IRS agent. I mean, they might have a hard time proving anything against him without the records, and he could say it was their fault they got lost.”
Conan restrained the tendency of his right hand to make a fist.
“You’re saying that Brian methodically removed the records and any evidence of them from this room, then left Nye’s body in his freezer while he slept peacefully on the bar, giving himself no alibi at all?”
Kleber only shrugged. “Well, I don’t figure he meant to leave the body in his freezer, but he’d hoisted a few—he said so himself—so maybe by the time he got around to deciding what to do about the body, he just plain passed out.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you can’t—”
“He was alone in that restaurant from two o’clock on. Now, Mrs. Randall said that after Tally belted you when he was trying to lay Nye out, Tally told him he’d talk to him later. So, maybe that later was after two o’clock.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Not for a fact, but I’ll tell you one thing I do know, Flagg, and you can’t talk your way around it. Nye left a message in his own blood, and the initials were B.T.”
Conan felt an aching in his left hand; he was trying to make a fist of it, too. He had no answer for those initials. But there was one. In the name of all that was reasonable, there had to be an answer.
“Now, here’s something interesting.”
Conan turned abruptly toward Steve, who was delving into the suitcase on the rack at the end of the bed.
It was a business-size envelope. Steve extricated its contents carefully and spread them on the bed. Kleber studied them from over Steve’s right shoulder, while Conan took a vantage point on his left, his bruised jaw still painfully tense.
The return address was the Multnomah County Sheriff’s office, and the two documents were weighted with fustian authority. The first was a summons, the second a complaint in dissolution of marriage filed by Loma Moody Nye.
Conan said softly, “Well, it seems even tax collectors have private lives. And private problems.”
Steve sighed. “Almost makes them human. This is dated February third. I wonder if he filed a response—” The door opened, and he frowned, ready to give a curt order, but never got around to it. “What is it, Jeff?”
Lieutenant Kaw pulled a plastic evidence bag out of his coat pocket as he approached.
“Thought you’d want to see these, Steve. We just found them in the cooler at the restaurant.”
The brown-wrapped marijuana joints were easily identified; so were the orange Dexedrine tablets in one bottle and the red Seconal capsules in the second.
Steve said, “I’ll be damned. Well, those bottles should give us some nice prints.”
Kleber’s narrowed eyes moved from the drugs in Kaw’s hand to the documents on the bed, and Conan wondered if it was coming through to him that there might be unexpected complications in his open-and-shut case.
But he only shrugged indifferently as he turned away.
“Mr. Travers, maybe we should get down to the station and talk to those witnesses.”
Chapter 7
Conan went to the police station and offered his duly sworn statement but didn’t ask to sit in on the questioning of the other witnesses. He had Steve Travers’ promise—made discreetly out of Kleber’s hearing—that he would let Conan see copies of the statements, and since he wouldn’t be free to ask his own questions, attending the inquiries didn’t seem worth a confrontation with Kleber.
He waited outside the station, propped against Brian’s blue Buick convertible. The weather was still a premature miracle as the day turned to afternoon, but he didn’t find his surroundings inspiring. The Holliday Beach police station, a concrete-block building with the architectural austerity of a WPA project, and not a
s much flair, was on a side street two blocks east of the highway where the snarl of passing log trucks was still audible.
When Brian emerged from the station, Tilda Capek was at his side, looking as fresh as a Tyrolean peasant girl with her pale hair in a single braid at the nape of her neck. Brian looked far from fresh, but he produced a smile for Conan. “Well, they let me out this time.”
“And told you not to leave town, I suppose. Hello, Tilda. I hope the grilling wasn’t too grueling.”
“Not really. Your friend Mr. Travers is a gentleman.”
“So he is, and if Brian believes in prayer, he better say a few in gratitude that Steve was assigned to this case.”
“Oh, I have,” Brian sighed. “I’ve said a lot of prayers lately. So, uh, you come up with anything yet?”
“Questions, that’s all. And I have a few for you. Like, were the exhaust fans on in the kitchen last night?”
“I hope so. We never turn them off. All the grills and ovens run on gas. If any of the pilot lights go off, the place is less likely to blow up with the fans to pull the fumes out.”
Conan nodded. “Okay, here’s another. One of Steve’s men found some drugs in the cooler—not the over-the-counter variety. You have any ideas about that?”
Tilda gave Brian a rueful, I-told-you-so look, while he screwed up his face in annoyance.
“Damn. They probably belong to Johnny Hancock. And I thought—I hoped he’d seen the light.”
“You knew he was on drugs, then?”
“Half the kids I hire are on drugs. That’s just a fact of life. Trouble with Johnny is he decided to use the restaurant for a retail outlet, and I won’t stand still for that.”
Tilda said gently, “But you did, Brian. You can’t reform one like that, not even with a threat.”
He put his arm around her, nodding down at the ground. “I guess not, but I thought he’d be better off here than in prison. I mean, he was working at something constructive and pulling a good wage.”
Conan said, “Concentrate on the kids; it’s too late for Hancock. What kind of threat were you using to reform him?”
“Well, about six months ago, I caught him selling joints to one of the busboys, and I read him the riot act; told him to get out and not to bother to come back.”