by Maddie Day
Was it safe to talk to this guy? Or if safe, was it prudent? Obviously I couldn’t stop my strong-willed grandmother from doing she wanted, but that didn’t mean I had to speak with a private investigator who hadn’t even shown us his license.
He glanced around. “Can we can sit down somewhere?”
I didn’t have any place to sit and chat inside, and there was nowhere out front here, either. We could sit at the picnic table, but either Abo Reba or I should really be inside ready to welcome new rentees. Orlean was too busy to saddle her with welcoming customers right now. Rats. Despite not wanting to divulge anything, I was dying to hear how the conversation would go, and whether Billy Crump would leak a speck of information or two. I wasn’t interested in leaving my grandmother alone with him.
Two older couples sauntered up. Older than me, younger than my grandmother. “We’d like to rent bikes for a week,” one of the women offered.
“Sorry, sonny,” Abo Reba said to Crump as she shook her head. “Our chat will have to wait.” She ushered the customers into the shop, saying, “Come along with me.”
I could have protested that I’d help them, instead. But I didn’t.
“I’d love to have a word with you, too, Ms. Almeida,” Crump said, plastering on a hopeful look.
I gave my head a little shake. “I’m sorry. I’m otherwise engaged and already late for an appointment. Maybe another time.” Maybe. I turned my back on him. Unless he wanted to tell me who had employed him, my lips were zipped. I couldn’t avoid talking to the actual police if they asked. But PIs of questionable provenance? That was another pot of chowder entirely.
Once inside the shop I snuck a quick look through the front window. Crump stood rooted in place with a notebook, madly scribbling. Recording direct quotes? Casing out the layout of the shop? Jotting down the questions he didn’t get to ask? Maybe I’d judged him too fast. Or maybe he was a reporter in disguise. I’d nearly crumpled his card in my hand. Now I smoothed it out on my palm.
Billy Crump, Private Investigator was all it read, with a telephone number in the bottom right corner. The other side was blank. No website, no license number. I’d made the right decision. I was dying to know who’d hired him and why, but he didn’t seem willing to share that information. I entered his name and phone number in my phone Contacts, just in case.
I grabbed yesterday’s profits in their zippered envelope of out my small safe and poked my head into the repair side. “I’m heading to the bank and a few other errands. Give my grandma a hand if she needs it, okay?”
Orlean nodded without looking up from spinning a wheel to check its truing. I sidled through to the other side.
“I’m going out for an hour. You good?” I asked Abo Reba.
She gave me a thumbs-up.
“Get you anything?”
She made a shooing motion with both hands. “Go, Mac,” she said, and turned her back on me.
I went, slipping out the back door with my EpiPen bag. First I made a quick stop home to use the facilities, then took a minute to Google Billy Crump, private investigator. Not a hit came up. Really? He didn’t appear to be legit at all. To avoid whoever he was if he still loitered in front of my shop, I headed out on a side street toward the other end of town instead of back through the shop. Billy Crump could go bug somebody else for a while.
Chapter Fifteen
After I made my deposit at the bank, I popped into Salty Taffy’s next door, but Gin was busy with a line of customers, so I grabbed a free taffy sample, waved at her, and moved on.
Where to next? I gazed up and down the main drag. School must be over for the day, because small clumps of students big and not so big were hanging out, buying a soda, throwing a fluorescent green disk around on the green in front of Town Hall. The sidewalks were also nicely full of tourists. Seeing so many of them boded well for the summer if the trend kept up.
I snapped my fingers. I was invited to Tim’s for dinner and I should pick up a bottle of wine to go with the meal. Zane sold wine as well as liquors, his own and others’, and his shop was right beyond the library. Maybe he’d seen the sad young woman again. I could stop in and say hi to Flo on my way, too. She’d been so organized at the meeting last night, with her pad of paper and her questions about suspicious behavior. I wondered if the reputed private investigator had been in to quiz her, too. But when I turned down the lane leading to the library, a Westham police cruiser drove toward me. It pulled to a stop and Victoria climbed out.
“Hi, Vickie.”
She blew a breath out from between clenched jaws. “Mac, you know I hate that nickname. Why do you even try?”
I didn’t know. It was perverse of me. And not a bit nice. Abo Reba would have scolded me up one side and down the next. “Sorry about that. How’s the case going? Did you all find Jake’s killer yet?” I used my sweetest voice.
“Innocence has never become you, Mackenzie Almeida. No, we haven’t found the murderer. That is, Detective Haskins hasn’t. Don’t you think you would have heard if we had?”
Of course I would have. Hard to keep news from leaking in a town the size of ours. Although more folks than usual seemed to be keeping secrets this week. “Are there any developments you can share?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. You do know that police work is for the police, not for amateurs.”
“Of course.”
She set her fists on her slim hips. “I’ve heard your mystery book group has some crazy notion you can solve this case. That could be very, very dangerous.”
“That’s what I told them.” I went for the innocent look again, but this time she didn’t comment on it.
“I hope you’ll dissuade them from even trying. However, I do have a request for you personally,” Victoria continued. “The detective very much wants to speak to your brother. Do you know where he might be?” She ducked just in time to avoid getting a haircut from the flying green disk. It clattered to the pavement behind her.
“Sorry, Chief Laitinen,” a boy’s voice called. Boy becoming a man, since the voice started out deep and cracked through to a higher pitch by the end of her name. The speaker, a slender young teen, dashed past the police car, scooped up the disk, and threw it back over our heads.
“Stay out of the street, will you?” Victoria replied, but her tone was more friendly than harsh. She watched him run off before speaking again. “Well, do you know how we can reach Derrick?” She crossed her arms and looked up into my face, which had even more altitude than usual, since she stood in the street and I was on the curb.
I stepped down to minimize the difference. “Frankly, I don’t know where my brother is. He hasn’t come to work for two days.” Should I at least tell her that I’d talked to him last night? I decided I had an obligation to. “I did speak with him by phone last night and he said he was home. But he wouldn’t talk about anything. In fact he hung up on me.”
She shook her head, looking thoroughly exasperated.
“I have a question for you.” I lowered my voice. “A guy named Billy Crump stopped by the shop a little while ago. He said he’s a private investigator and he wanted to talk to both my grandmother and me. He gave us a card, but the only contact info is a phone number. Maybe PIs don’t advertise with a website, but he also didn’t show us a license or anything. Should I worry? Have you seen him?”
“Do you still have the card?”
I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it over.
“What does he look like?”
“Fireplug, thin dark hair, balding.” I looked across the street, thinking. “He might have had one more identifying feature. I can’t think of it now.”
She handed back the card. “Never heard of him. I’ll ask around the station, though. You could do a search on his name, you know.”
“I did, and nothing came up.”
“Did you talk to this Crump about the murder?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, I told him I wouldn’t talk to him at all. I also didn�
�t like that he wouldn’t say who had hired him. Only that it was an interested party, as he put it.”
“Good. You know not to reveal details of the crime scene, correct?”
“Yes. Detective Haskins also told me that.” I thought again of Suzanne referring to the stabbing. Where had she learned that?
“Probably better not to talk with this so-called PI at all,” Victoria advised.
“I won’t. Abo Reba was willing have a conversation with the guy, but then customers came in and she got busy.”
Victoria cocked her head. “You got your grandmother filling in for your brother?”
“Actually, yes. She’s a natural, and I needed the help.” I extended Billy Crump’s card to her. “I saved the number. Keep it, if you want. Otherwise I was going recycle it. And I’m going to encourage my grandma not to talk with him either, but of course I can’t control what she does.”
“Too bad.” Victoria slid the card into her uniform shirt pocket and thanked me. A radio crackle came from the open window of the cruiser. She stuck her head in the passenger side and listened, then straightened.
“Gotta run. And please, if you—”
“I know. If I find Derrick, urge him to contact you. Of course I will.”
* * *
Florence wasn’t in her office or at the library’s main desk when I arrived, so I signed in for a half hour at one of the computers. Obviously I could extend my search for Billy Crump on my phone, but it was so much easier to use a full-size keyboard and a big screen.
Searching the Internet wasn’t my friend today, though. All the permutations of Billy/Bill/William/Will Crump plus the words “private investigator” yielded exactly nothing. I swore silently. Why couldn’t I find mention of him somewhere if he was a genuine PI? He must have been lying. But if he was a reporter, wouldn’t he get in trouble for using a false name to interview someone? Maybe the entire name was false, including Crump. I typed the phone number into the search bar to no avail.
I poked around looking for other information about Jake’s death. For news stories about the killing. For anything, really. When that search proved unsatisfactory, too, I typed in Katherine Deloit. Now here was a person who appeared to be exactly who she said she was. Real estate agent in Westwood, California. When I looked up Westwood, it appeared to be a town where stars lived and shopped. Where rich Chinese investors were snapping up property right and left. Where filmmakers rubbed elbows with venture capitalists, politicians, and the occasional UCLA professor, but only professors in lucrative fields of study like engineering and business. That pocket of Los Angeles sounded almost as elite as what I’d heard about Beverly Hills.
And Ms. Deloit was earning her share of the wealth, one property at a time according to the past sales listed on her website. Not a criminal act, however. Neither was looking for a property for one Mr. Wu. I tried to search on Mr. Wu, but the name was way too common to get anything useful without a first name, even specifying Westwood. I slumped, staring at the screen. This was going nowhere. I probably should get back to the shop and see if my grandma needed bailing out.
“Mac, find anything good?” Flo asked, having approached me from behind.
I exclaimed and sat up straight. “You startled me. No, I didn’t find anything good. Or much of anything at all. You?”
She sank down at the next station over. “I’ve been working all day. Head librarian is a great job, don’t get me wrong. But I also have to ‘interface’ with the town, the Friends of the Library, and sometimes even the Fire Department chief. I spend much of my day dealing with people instead of books and information. Only on Cape Cod.” She lifted a shoulder and dropped it. “Oh, well.”
“Then help me find some information. A man calling himself Billy Crump told my grandmother and me this afternoon he’s a private investigator.” I repeated what I’d told Victoria about us not talking to him, and him not saying who had hired him. “I can’t find a trace of him on the Internet. Which, these days, kind of makes you wonder.”
Flo stood, crooking her index finger in a come-hither gesture. “Ve haf our methods.”
I grinned, logged off the public system, and followed her to her office. Flo always left the door open, but at least she had walls around her space. Other than the restrooms, it was one of the only private rooms in the building. She pulled the visitor chair over behind the desk and patted the seat.
“So you can follow what I’m doing,” she said.
Except she typed so fast and the screen changed so often I couldn’t follow a thing. As I waited, I pulled out the file blade on my little Swiss Army knife and smoothed off a rough edge on my thumbnail that kept catching on everything.
Two minutes later, thanks to the specialized databases Flo could access, we had our answer.
She pointed to a head shot. “Is that him?”
I nodded. “It is.” This picture was from his slightly slimmer days but it was him all right, gap between the front teeth and all. That was the bit I’d forgotten to tell Victoria.
“His driver’s license is under the name Wilhelm Krumpf, and his PI license, too.” Flo kept typing. “He’s a German national, apparently. Hang on. Let me follow that thread a little longer.”
“So maybe he had to use his passport to get his license?”
“Wait. Almost got it.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “Voilà.” She sat back. “He’s lived in the States since he came here for college, but never became a citizen.”
“And the reason I couldn’t find Billy Crump on the Internets?”
“All his official dealings, any record keeping about him, it’s all as Wilhelm Krumpf. Not Billy Crump, which he must have Americanized himself.”
“Like what immigrants have done for years, Americanizing or simplifying their names to fit in,” I said. “Schwartz to Black, or Honghui to Henry.” I’d met a banker in Boston who’d done just that. Even when I was interested in his Chinese name, he’d insisted on being called Henry.
“Exactly.” Flo bobbed her head but kept her gaze on the screen.
“Does it say where he lives?”
More rapid fire typing. A crew of early-teen girls bustled by, all whispers and giggles, one of them glancing behind her at a couple of boys. A man in a wheelchair rolled by us toward the checkout desk, five books stacked in his lap. The elevator dinged its arrival across the spacious room, and a toddler wailed to her mom about wanting more stories, now.
“Looks like Crump, aka Krumpf, lives up Cape in Plymouth,” Flo declared. “Not that Plymouth is really Cape Cod at all, being north of the canal.”
The seven-mile long Cape Cod Canal, completed a hundred years earlier, sliced the upper arm of the peninsula in half. The cut greatly facilitated boat travel, both commercial and recreational, from Cape Cod Bay to Buzzard’s Bay, from Sandwich to Bourne and back.
I sat back. “Now that we know he’s actually a PI, do you think I should call him, talk to him?”
Flo turned to look at me. “What do you think?”
“Actually, doesn’t much matter what I think. Victoria advised me not to.”
“You already told her about him?”
“Ran into her out front.” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the street.
“Ah. Well, as long as you don’t reveal stuff to him she doesn’t want you to, can it hurt?”
“What I’d prefer is getting information from him rather than the reverse.” I scrunched up my nose. “Have you heard anything from Norland about the murder, or from Tulia? I know they were going to be keeping their ears and eyes open, too.”
“Not a thing.”
“I’ll drop by the Lobstah Shack when I get a chance and ask her.”
“How are you doing with next week’s book?” Flo asked.
“Terrible. I haven’t even started it. Gin and I usually listen during our morning walks, but we’ve been talking about murder instead.” And I’d volunteered to check something this morning. What had it been? Ah. The fog bank. “I n
eed to figure out when the fog rolled in on Tuesday. Do you remember? Was it before we started the book group meeting?”
Flo tugged at her earlobe, a habit she had when she was thinking. “I think it was right about that time. Yes, it was around six. I remember because I was driving over from my house, which is a bit inland, and by the time I got to the lighthouse it was socked in.”
Her tugging her at her ear made me think of Suzanne. She’d done the same after she arrived home last night. Right before describing Jake as having been stabbed.
“Flo, have you heard anyone talking about how Jake was murdered? Read it anywhere?”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. You didn’t say, did you?’”
“No.”
“I only know what Suzanne told me.” Flo turned back to her desk and resumed typing. After a couple of minutes, she said, “Can’t find a single mention.”
I waited, but she clearly didn’t remember what her daughter had said last night. I wasn’t about to bring it up, but I couldn’t deny that Suzanne’s knowing worried me. A lot.
* * *
Bottle of Shiraz in hand, I browsed the shelves at Cape King Liquors while I waited for Zane to finish with his current customer. King’s Bounty Rum was one of Zane’s specialties, along with Z&S Bourbon, which he’d created after he and Stephen became husband and husband. I didn’t care much for hard liquor. Clearly plenty of people did or Zane’s business wouldn’t be the success it was. On my way here I’d wanted to pop into Greta’s Grains across the street and say hi to Tim, but I’d missed my window. He closed the bakery at 3 P.M.
The door shut after the customer. “Hey, Mac. That’s all you want?” Zane smiled and waved from the register.
“In the wine department? Yes, for now.” I set the bottle on the counter.
“I’ll bet you’re like me, wanting to know who killed Jake.”
“Of course. I was talking to Victoria Laitinen a little while ago.”
“Chief Laitinen.” A ding sounded from the register. “That’ll be fourteen ninety-nine.”
I dug a twenty out of my pocket and handed it to him. “She wants to be sure our book group knows we aren’t supposed to be trying to investigate this thing. That it could be, in her words, very, very dangerous.”