Holmes didn’t give me any questions for the man, so I continued asking my own.“Why did you go back last night?”
“I was still looking for the backpack. I’d dropped it in the hall outside the flat when I ran out, but it wasn’t there any more, so I went inside and...“
”Yes,” Watson added, “and ran into Miss Holmes and me.”
“What were you two doing there?”
“Looking for the bullet you fired. It apparently missed Andrews and lodged in the wall, and the police found it. We saw the marks where they dug it out.”
“So they know I didn’t kill Andrews.”
“Yet it’s attempted murder, isn’t it?” Watson said.
“I guess if you’d given my gun to the police...”
Watson interrupted again. “But you know we didn’t.”
“Luckily I got my hands on it before you did.” Parton wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Still, your message said you have an amber necklace that you’ll return to me. Why did you think I lost an amber necklace?”
“We’ll tell you,” I said, “but we want to know the truth first.”
“What truth?”
“Why you wanted to kill Andrews.”
Parton shifted in his chair. “I don’t understand. You’re not the police, but I did see a sign next to your doorbell downstairs that said, ‘Private Investigations.’ Is one of you a private eye, and if you are, who hired you to find me?”
“I’m studying to be one,” I admitted. “That is, I plan to, but this case... Well, if you must know, it’s because of a bet. We knew a body had been found in that flat, and had a bet that I could identify the murderer before the police did.”
“A bet?” Parton repeated, in a voice that indicated he thought it ridiculous. Which, at that moment, I agreed with.
I quickly changed the subject. “So my grandmother, Mrs. Reynolds...” I pointed to Tessa. “...knew the landlord and he let us in. The body had been removed by then.” My tone dropped. “One thing sort of led to another.”
“You mean about finding my backpack?”
“The couple upstairs found it, and, when I said I’d hand it over to Mr. Kostitch, they gave it to me. I used my cell phone and took some pictures of the contents before Kostitch took it from me.”
“So that’s how you got my cell phone.”
“I didn’t intend to keep it, but it accidentally got in my purse.” That sounded so lame, I wanted to melt into the floor.
“Is that how you got my home phone number?”
“Yes,” Watson answered, “but not your address. Where do you live, by the way?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”
“We know your area code, and that means you live in Chicago.”
“Chicago’s a very big city.”
“We also know your last name.”
“You didn’t get that from my cell phone.” Parton got up and paced the floor. “You’re not the police, so I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“Unless you want to know about the necklace.”
He sat down again. “Okay. So you went to that flat last night just to snoop around?”
“To look for the missing bullet. We found the hole in the wall, and then you came in, and you know the rest.”
Holmes spoke at last. “Ask him about the pictures.”
I complied. “We found a picture in your backpack as well as a newspaper clipping about a young woman whose body was found in a well near Chicago. It’s the same woman, isn’t it?”
Tessa jumped in. “She was your sister, wasn’t she?” Tessa had pulled out the notepad, which now contained scribbles that resembled the Gregg shorthand she’d learned in high school and once explained to me.
Parton frowned. “Yeah. How did you find that out?”
“At the library,” Tessa said.
I took over. “The San Francisco library carries copies of the Chicago Tribune, and we not only found an article like the one you tore out, but a follow-up article with another picture of the woman and her name. By that time we knew your name was Parton, so it wasn’t a big stretch to figure out Adele Parton Andrews might be your sister and that she might have been married to Andrews.”
Parton lowered his head and wiped his cheek with his arm, as if hiding tears. “Yeah.”
After more silence, while I let him recover, I went on. “The picture we saw in your backpack is very similar to the one the newspaper printed the next day and identified as the woman found in the well. In both photos she’s wearing a very unusual necklace that Holmes...that is, we... think is made of amber and resembles a curled-up sleeping cat.”
Parton glanced over at me and a tiny smile lifted his lips for a second. “How did you get hold of it?”
Since we didn’t, I couldn’t answer that, so I hedged. “We just want the facts. We know now that Andrews died because of his fall on the marble fender. In fact, Tessa got blood on her skirt from that same place. And we know you shot at him, even though the bullet went wild. What we don’t know is why you wanted to kill him.”
Parton took a deep breath and looked up at me. “I’ll tell you why, and then I’m leaving.”
“No problem,” Watson said.
I looked at the others and saw them nodding their heads.
Parton took another breath. “Okay, but it’s a long story.”
Holmes rose from his position by the table and advanced to the sofa. He sat at one end, leaned his head against the back rest and closed his eyes. However, he managed to speak to me.
“So long as I still have time to watch Pygmalion before I retire at midnight. I saw Mr. Shaw’s play in London and am overjoyed to know it has been made into a film.” He grinned.
Chapter 10
Parton stared at his hands in his lap for a few moments before beginning. “As I said when I came in, my name is Parton. It’s Lawrence Parton and Adele was my sister, my twin sister, actually.
“As you can imagine, we were very close physically and emotionally. Our relationship became even more pronounced for two reasons. First, our parents had no more children, and, second, our mother died when we were only five years old. Our father, we were told later, suffered from grief, became an alcoholic and could no longer take care of us.
“One aunt, who had never married, took us into her home in a suburb of Chicago where we lived until we were eighteen. Aunt Emily was kind enough but had no parenting skills, and we were as happy to leave as she was to see us go.
“We wanted to go to college so we found one we both liked, but I won’t tell you which one, and got an apartment off campus so we could be together.”
Watson had begun to roll his eyes, and I suspected he thought something incestuous went on. Parton squashed that idea right away.
“Our mother had taken out an insurance policy and the money stretched enough to cover living expenses, plus we both got scholarships and part-time jobs. We liked being together and Adele and I took turns cooking and cleaning up. She found a boyfriend very soon, and I had my pick of pretty girls for Saturday night dates.” He paused and shook his head, as if remembering.
“That lasted the whole year, and then I got the stupid idea of joining the Army Rangers.”
“Doesn’t sound stupid to me,” Watson said.
“I didn’t think so at the time, but if I hadn’t done that, Adele might be alive today.” He wiped a tear from his face before continuing.
“You see, I did it for the wrong reasons. Guys always teased me about living with my sister. Made me feel like some kind of sissy. But Adele okayed anything I wanted to do, and she had a great boyfriend I thought I could trust to take care of her. So I signed up and went to Georgia for training. They didn’t let me come home very often, and we couldn’t afford flights back and forth to visit.”
He paused again and I poured a glass of water for him from the pitcher I had placed on the table earlier.
“Then Adele’s boyfriend got a football scholarshi
p to a really good college and left town.”
“Did Adele find another boyfriend?” Tessa asked.
“Yeah, you guessed it, but not right away. She just worked and studied and went to school for the next two years. She adopted a kitten from the humane society so she wouldn’t be so lonely, and that Christmas I sent her the necklace with the amber pendant that resembled a cat. She said she loved it and wore it all the time.” He looked around at us. “You can see why I’d like to have it back.”
I confess I found tears filling my eyes and wished we really had the necklace so we could give it to him.
“After I was sent to Iraq, Adele finally met someone else. She told me all about him in the e-mails she sent or when we could talk on the phone.”
“That was Andrews?” Watson asked.
“Right, Gerard Andrews. He seemed really good to Adele at first and wanted to marry her right away, but I asked her to wait until I could come home and meet the guy.” He took a long gulp of water. “He had learned how to be a magician and wanted them to go on the entertainment circuit together. She would be his assistant. You know, the pretty girl who hands the magician things and gets sawn in half, or seems to.”
“So did she do that?” Tessa wanted to know.
“No, she never did. She gradually lost interest in him, and later she confessed to me that he really wasn’t such a nice guy after all. Insensitive to the animals he used in his acts, Adele said. She thought he also abused the birds and rabbits he worked with. Then her cat disappeared, and Adele thought Gerard had either let it out one freezing cold night or deliberately killed it.”
Parton took another deep breath. “Suddenly I stopped hearing from her. I couldn’t reach her by phone or e-mail. I asked for an emergency leave so I could try to find her, but my C.O. reminded me I’d be out in three more months so I should just be patient.” His last words were almost incoherent. “I never saw her again.”
Tessa broke the silence in the room by crying into a soggy handkerchief, and I had to blow my nose. Parton rested his head on his arms, which he braced on his knees, and Watson went over to the table and poured a glass of water for himself.
Holmes, on the other hand, seemed unaffected. “Ask him about the picture.”
I assumed he meant the newspaper clipping about the woman in the well, so I waited only a little longer before I broached the subject. “When I looked in your backpack, I saw the newspaper clipping you saved. How did you know the woman in the abandoned well was your sister?”
“The police told me Adele and Andrews were married,” he mumbled, not looking up. “They were separated at the time and the police thought someone else strangled her and then dumped her in the well.”
“Yet you thought Andrews did it?”
“The police had no proof he did. He didn’t even get arrested. I can’t talk about that...it hurts too much.”
Watson returned to his seat. “Okay then. Tell us how you and Andrews ended up in a vacant flat in San Francisco.”
“Because of the flyer for the magician’s seminar that I saw in your backpack?” I asked.
Parton looked up, took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. “I found out where Andrews lived and went there, but he’d moved out just the day before, told the landlord he was leaving town.”
“What did you do next?”
“I looked up magician’s stuff on the Internet, found out about the seminar here. I didn’t know for sure he’d go to it, but it was a chance I had to take.”
I persisted. “So he did go there. Did he recognize you? Did he know who you were?”
“Adele had never shown him a picture of me. Anyway, if she had, it would have been in my uniform and I look a lot different in civvies.”
“So you went to the seminar...” Holmes prompted, and I repeated that to Parton.
“Yes, I found him. I introduced myself to him with a fake name, told him I wanted to be magician too, acted like I needed his help.”
Watson spoke next. “And he fell for that?”
“Yeah, especially after I took him to a bar for drinks. We were real buddy-buddy by the time I drove him to the apartment.”
“How did you know it would be vacant?” Tessa asked.
“I’d done my homework beforehand. I scoped out the place, pretending I wanted to rent it, and managed to make a duplicate key.”
Tessa’s voice rose. “You know how to do that?”
“It’s easy.” He paused. “The hard part was getting up the nerve to kill him when we got inside. I had to tell him then who I was and why he had to die. He didn’t admit he strangled her. He only said they’d had a terrible quarrel, but I could tell he lied.” His voice rose. “Why throw her body in a well if he didn’t kill her?”
After a long pause, he went on. “I knew I should do it right away, but when I didn’t, he saw my hesitation and took advantage of it. He grabbed for the gun and we struggled until I shoved him backward and the gun accidentally went off. He fell on top of that marble fender in front of the fireplace and then dropped onto the floor.”
Parton had risen and held his arms in front of him, as if reenacting the fight scene. Suddenly his hands dropped and he collapsed back in the chair again. His shoulders slumped and tears rolled down his face. He looked as if he were reliving a moment in the past. His words came out forced and scratchy.
“I killed a man. He stood in the doorway of his hut and his wife came running toward me, screaming. I didn’t know Arabic. I didn’t understand her words. The soldier behind me shot her.”
I stared at Parton in shock. Could he be reliving an experience that took place in Iraq?
“I can still hear that woman’s screams in my head almost every night.”
The room erupted into motion. Watson, Tessa, even Holmes, rose to their feet and came toward the table. Watson, Tessa and I took glasses and drank some water, as if we had never been so thirsty before. My throat seemed parched, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
Holmes filled the silence. “Is that all?”
After I swallowed some water, I repeated the question to Parton.
“You know the rest. The tenants on the floor above apparently heard the gunshot and called the police as well as the landlord. He came running up from his flat on the ground floor just as the upstairs folks came down. Then I heard sirens and police cars. I got out as fast as I could.”
Tessa asked, “What will you do now?”
“I have to go to Seattle for thirty days’ debriefing and then I‘ll be discharged. I know now that war is hell. My four years are up, and I’m not reenlisting.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll stay in Seattle. I don’t like Chicago, and San Francisco might be too hot for me. In case the police find me like you did.”
Watson came close and shook Parton’s hand. “I wish we had Adele’s necklace to give to you, but we don’t.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. I didn’t really believe you had it. My aunt had Adele buried before I could come home, so maybe she knows where it is. I hope my sister is buried with it.”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand, took a last glance around the room and then went out the door.
* * *
After Parton left, I made a pot of coffee and brought out the chocolate-covered custard eclairs I’d bought at the bakery. Our mouths soon decorated with chocolate and custard, we finally talked about what we’d learned that evening.
Watson licked custard from his lips. “Do you realize we had the wanted man here and we just let him go?”
“Wanted by whom?” I asked. “As Parton said a little while ago, we’re not the police, and, at least according to the news, they don’t have a suspect on their radar.”
“My friend, Mr. Kostitch,” Tessa said, “gave that backpack to the police. If they have it, they could learn what we did.”
Holmes spoke up then, and I repeated his words to the others. “If they’re clever enough to work it out, the local police, like my old friend Lestrade, w
ill claim all the glory for themselves.” A sly grin spread across his features. “However, I have a feeling Mr. Parton is safe from prosecution.”
“I hope he is, poor man,” Tessa said. “I’m going to be Dr. Watson to Sherry’s ‘Holmes’ and write a story about the case.”
Watson laughed and said at least he didn’t have to do it.
Holmes, the only one of us without a custard mustache, looked smug. He turned to me.“I do believe you have won our wager. We do not know what the police think, but in my opinion, you solved the case of the amber necklace.”
“The Case of the Amber Necklace?” I repeated.
Tessa squealed. “Oh, that will be the title of my story.”
“What did I win?”
“Now that I think of it,” Holmes said, “we never mentioned a prize. What would you like as a reward?”
“I’d like an amber cat.”
“I’ll buy one for you tomorrow,” Watson said.
Holmes held up a hand. “Not a real one. Unless being dead for a hundred years has changed me even more, I believe I am allergic to cat hair.”
“So you’re going to continue to live here in San Francisco? In my apartment?”
He looked around the room for a moment. “It would appear I do not have a choice.”
THE END
Other titles by Phyllis Humphrey
Holmes and Holmes Series
Book 2 – THE SIGN OF FIVE
Book 3 – THE RED HERRING
Romance Novels
COLD APRIL - A love story set on the Titanic
THE ITALIAN JOB - An Italian backdrop for a novel of romance, jealousy, and old questions that need to be resolved.
NORTH BY NORTHEAST – On a sightseeing train trip, a jewel heist and a kidnapping give a schoolteacher and a mysterious passenger more excitement than they bargained for.
ONCE MORE WITH FEELING – A female San Francisco stock broker deals with a handsome new client, his eccentric twin aunts and an insider trading scandal.
A Study in Amber Page 8