Frogskin and Muttonfat (A Thea Barlow Mystery, Book Two)

by Carol Caverly

  “Anyone in these other rooms?” Dwayne asked.

  “No,” Florie said. “Jenny Frisco’s rented, but they’re on an overnight pack trip in Wind River. They’ll be back tomorrow, or the next day.”

  Buck strung some yellow tape across the open door to Phoebe’s room, then took the camera back into my room and began to take pictures.

  Reality struck like a cudgel. Not only was Phoebe dead, she had been murdered. Someone had intentionally taken her life, plunged a knife deep into her back while she lay helpless, sleeping—in my room. My stomach churned with horror and a sudden shot of fright. Who? Why? Had someone meant to kill me, but got Phoebe by mistake? No, that couldn’t be. Nobody could have mistaken that red hair for mine, unless, I thought uneasily, Phoebe had roused from her drunken stupor, turned the light off, and the killer had struck in the dark.

  I played with the idea. I’d left the light on in my room when I went to hunt for her key, because I didn’t want her thinking she was tucked in for the night. When I returned the light was off, but Phoebe lay on the bed in the same position as when I’d left her. She hadn’t moved. Whoever had done this must have stabbed her, switched off the light, and left the room. It made sense. No matter what way I looked at it, the choices were chilling: the killer either knew who his victim was, or it was a random act of murder.

  Or robbery, maybe? I remembered the woman downstairs wearing a fortune in silver jewelry. Could someone have been skulking around up here, waiting for an opportunity? My brain bounced crazily from thought to thought.

  Then a picture entered my mind. The Kid, hovering in doorways, watching. Kid Corcoran, a resident criminal. Could he…

  I covered my face with my hands, trying to still the wild mix of images that came to mind. Stop. I took a couple deep breaths. Think. I leaned against the wall, willing calmness to take over. Could the Kid have done this?

  I had seen him downstairs. I remembered watching his slow progress down the hall toward his room, then, after looking for Florie in the kitchen area and heading back to find Rocky, I’d again seen the Kid at his doorway. It had taken him that long to go a fairly short distance. At that point, would he have been able to scurry back through the hallways, up the backstairs, stab Phoebe and hide himself in the upper hallway before I ran up and discovered her body? I’d been delayed only a few minutes more. At the rate he was moving, the Kid wouldn’t have even gotten up the stairs in that length of time.

  And what about the light in Phoebe’s room? If neither Florie nor Rocky had turned it off, then…

  “Whoever killed Phoebe had to be hiding up here when I found her,” I said aloud.

  Rocky and Florie had huddled close together, watching the officers in my room.

  Florie jerked around. “Why would anyone be up here?” She spat the words at me as if I’d accused her of dirty housekeeping, then began to cry. Rocky put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, but she’d found a convenient vent for her anger.

  “This is your fault,” she accused me between sobs. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t come here.” She covered her face. “This will ruin us,” she said. “We’ve worked so hard, now…nothing.”

  Crap. “I simply meant that if neither one of you turned the light off in Phoebe’s room, someone else must have.”

  “Don’t try to blame any of us,” she yelled. “You did this.”

  “Me?” I said, equally outraged.

  “All right, you two,” Dwayne stepped into the hall. In his hand he held the book I’d bought at Hildy’s store, The Story of Jade. “This yours?” he asked me, riffling through the pages. “You some kind of jade expert?”

  “I don’t know much about it at all,” I said, suddenly aware that maybe the purchase of the little volume had landed me in the midst of a local battlefield. “I just bought it today at the gift shop across the street.”

  He snapped the book shut and switched his penetrating gaze from me to Florie. “Where’s the Kid?”

  “Asleep,” she said. “In his room downstairs.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Buck,” he called. “Call the damn coroner, see what’s keeping him, and get us some help here. We gotta secure these rooms.”

  “Want me to call the Sheriff’ s—”

  “Nah, we don’t need anybody from the damn Sheriff Department. We can handle this. Call McConahy. He’ll come in. And Roscoe. While you’re down there check on the Kid. Go with him,” he gestured to Florie.

  “You want me to wake him up?” Florie asked.

  “Not yet, just make sure he’s there. Don’t worry, I’ll get around to him later,” he said with enough sarcasm to indicate no one had to point out a prime suspect to him.

  Florie caught the implication as well, and it was like seeing one of those cartoon light bulbs turn on above her head. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes flickered from one of us to another. Aha, I could see her thinking, this is the way to get the old man out of my hair; send him back to prison. “He was with her,” she said, licking her lips nervously, “that Zimmerman girl. She gave him a ride to the rodeo.”

  “Yeah?” Dwayne looked interested. “Is that right?”

  Florie nodded. “I don’t know where all she might have taken him.”

  Whoever said blood is thicker than water didn’t know this woman. I didn’t mind being eclipsed as chief suspect by any means, but I knew the old man couldn’t have done this particular deed.

  “I don’t know what he and Phoebe might have been doing, but I saw your grandfather downstairs at about the time this must have been happening.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Dwayne said. He gave us both a cold, fish-eyed stare, and slapped the jade book in his palm over and over again until I thought I’d scream.

  “Go on down, Buck,” he said, finally, and motioned Florie to follow him. “Send the guys up when they get here. Check around downstairs and keep an eye on the Kid’s room. You.”

  He pointed to me. “Stay here where I can see you.” To Rocky he said, “You can do what you gotta do, just don’t go anywhere. When we get some more help here I’m gonna want to talk to all of you.”

  “What about my things?” I asked, wondering for the first time where I was going to sleep.

  “You can have them when we’re through in there,” he said, then added, “Anything, that is, that isn’t needed for evidence.”

  Eleven

  I sat on the floor of the upstairs hallway, leaned against the wall and tried to get comfortable. Feeling like a misplaced person with all my belongings impounded, I dully watched the flare of the flashbulb playing around the interior of my room, and tried not to imagine what the camera focused on.

  Exhaustion had set in, my eyes were dry and gritty, the lids at half-mast. Somehow it seemed important that I try to figure out this light thing, since nobody else was interested. Who had turned it off, when and why, and did it mean anything? But it was difficult keeping my mind off Phoebe, lying there on my bed. Impossible to believe that such an outrageous, in-your-face, look-at-me personality could be so abruptly silenced.

  I couldn’t bear the stillness of her death, that she hadn’t moved, that she lay on the bed exactly as I’d left her. She’d had no knowledge, no chance to struggle, to fight for her life, just that sneaky, insidious snuffing between one breath and another. Outrageously unfair.

  My throat tightened, and I wiped a hand roughly across my eyes. No, I thought, gulping a bit, I didn’t want to think about Phoebe. Think about the damned light. Someone—come on, face it, the killer, murderer—had been lurking around up here, watching me while I prepared Phoebe’s room and then discovered her body. And why, the minute I’d run downstairs, turn the light off in Phoebe’s room? Trying to draw attention away from the room? But why? Why did the killer stay up here just to turn out the light in Phoebe’s room? It didn’t make sense.

  Buck came back upstairs, followed by a disheveled older man who looked like h
e’d just stumbled from bed. They joined Dwayne in my room.

  Dwayne had told Buck to keep an eye on the Kid’s room. Who was watching it now? Maybe some more of their help had arrived.

  I struggled to my feet; my legs were cramped and my butt sore. I had to move around and I wanted to tell Dwayne how I’d reached my conclusion that the Kid couldn’t have killed Phoebe.

  Dwayne stood in the door of my room giving orders to those inside. I went over to him and said, “I just want to explain to you why I think Kid Corcoran couldn’t have done this. When I was downstairs, trying to find a key to Phoebe’s room, I met him in the hallway; there’s no way he could have gotten back up here in time.”

  Dwayne stared at me gravely, and I realized that he didn’t know anything about me running around looking for Phoebe’s key. He hadn’t even begun to find out what had actually happened. I made one of those helpless gestures, and mumbled, “I’m sorry. I’m really tired.”

  He took my elbow. “Let’s go downstairs. I’m ready to take your statement.”

  I was only too glad to get away from that room. I led the way down the stairs, and made a beeline for the sofa in the sitting room, sinking into it with a tremendous sigh of relief.

  “Sit there,” Dwayne said unnecessarily, “I’ll go round up the Dunns.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded to him. Nothing had felt so comfortable to me in my life as this couch, at that moment. I leaned my head back and tucked my legs up on the cushions. As I began drifting off, I remembered reading somewhere that as far as the police were concerned, nothing signaled guilt as much as a suspect who falls asleep as soon as he’s brought in. Something about the release of nervous tension…or something…

  The next thing I knew Dwayne was shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, there. Wake up.” My head rolled on the armrest with the motion.

  “What?” I pried my eyes open. Dwayne stood over me, Rocky and Florie to the side, all staring at me. I struggled to sit up, and rubbed my eyes. My mouth was dry and I could feel dried saliva crusting the corner.

  “I need to get a statement from you,” Dwayne said. “You two can wait in there,” he told Florie and Rocky, pointing to a table in the dining room. “But get Miss Barlow here some coffee, if you’ve got some.”

  The coffee helped, but not much. My head felt as if it were stuffed with old dust rags, but I did my best to tell my story clearly and in great detail. I started with my first meeting with Phoebe here at Racy Ladies, and then at the rodeo.

  “She told me she worked for a small paper in California. Riverside, I think. She did local community news stories. She discovered Web Corcoran in a nursing home there, and wrote a piece about his early career as Kid Corcoran, when he was being mythologized as the last of the old-time bandits. It was a good story and was picked up by one of the larger papers around San Francisco. I have a copy of it in my briefcase, if you’re interested.”

  “And she came here to talk to the old fart again?” he asked with some disbelief.

  I shrugged. “I wondered about it myself, but I guess she thought a follow-up about how he felt going back to his childhood home would be worthwhile.” As it turned out she’d stumbled onto a better story than she could have expected, but I didn’t go into that.

  I gave him Jimmy Chin and Kendall Hauser’s names as others who had spoken with her at the rodeo.

  But we spent most of the time on the sequence of my finding Phoebe drunk on the front porch, through to her death in my room. We went through it three or four times, interrupted by frequent arrivals of yet one more person come to help, who had to get instructions from Dwayne as to where to go and what to do.

  And then a young guy in white pants and shirt arrived, carrying a folded stretcher in one hand. He snapped his fingers, bopping around to whatever he heard over his headphones and took the stairs two at a time. Soon he and the coroner came back down with Buck on one side balancing the stretcher and its blanket-shrouded burden. Dwayne got up and helped them out the front door.

  I felt cold and drained and found it hard to concentrate when Dwayne plopped back down in his chair. “Now, where were we?” he asked, thumbing through his notebook.

  So we went over it again. I worried about the quality of his note-taking, and wished I could peer over his shoulder and edit as he went. Again I made a special point of telling him I’d touched the knife handle, so he wouldn’t be surprised if my prints showed up on it, and spelled out the few deductions I’d reached on my own about the light in Phoebe’s bedroom. I even told him about Phoebe’s grabbing me earlier in the evening, insisting she had something of great importance to tell me.

  “And it was…?”

  “She never got around to telling me.”

  “So you have no idea what was on her mind?”

  “No, she…” I hesitated, unsure if I should mention the gossip-based conclusion I’d reached on my own. Still it seemed in my best interest to leave nothing out.

  I tried to choose my words carefully, not wanting to incriminate anyone else, particularly the Kid. Florie would handle that well enough on her own. And it was just gossip, after all.

  “I heard,” I said, “that there was a lot of talk around town about the death of Buster Brocheck’s father, and that Kid Corcoran might have been involved in it.”

  Dwayne snorted with more emotion than I’d seen from him all night. “That’s putting it lightly.”

  “Well,” I said, “I just figured that if I’d heard the rumor, Phoebe might well have also and, uh, wanted to gloat about it or something.”

  “You two were rivals?”

  “No. I didn’t even know her. I mean, not before this morning.”

  “But you were both here to get stories about Kid Corcoran?”

  “Well, yes, but there wasn’t any rivalry. I didn’t care what she wrote about. I’m just interested in the old stories about the Kid, his early career.”

  “Yeah?” He made no attempt to hide his skepticism. “And you don’t know nothing about any jade, I suppose.”

  “No, or…what exactly do you mean?”

  “Most everyone around Rawhide thinks the only reason Kid Corcoran would dare come back to town is because he’s got some kind of stash hidden somewhere. It seems he never could hang onto money, but he sure had some affinity for rocks. You know anything about that?”

  “No, I don’t. I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing as Wyoming jade before this morning.”

  “But you know it’s jade we’re talking about when the Kid’s name comes up?”

  “Well, yes. I told you I’d heard gossip about the Kid.”

  “And when you talked, or, uh, interviewed,” he gave a nasty twist to the word, “the Kid, did he give you any special information that led you to believe he was in town for a specific purpose?”

  “I’ve only spoken to him briefly. I haven’t interviewed him as yet.”

  “Don’t suppose you and that Phoebe woman were planning on doing a bit of jade hunting yourself, were you?”

  “No, of course not. I came to Rawhide to spend some time with a friend and to interview Web Corcoran for my magazine at the same time.”

  “And who is this friend?”

  “Max Holman. He’s drilling a well on Buster Brocheck’s ranch.”

  “He that geologist I hear’s running around out there?”

  No way. I didn’t want Max to get pulled into all this jade business, too. “He’s an oilman.”

  There was a dangerous undercurrent here that seemed to be coiling around me like a beast from the deep. If only I weren’t so tired. And there was something in good old Dwayne’s voice, or attitude, that had raised my antennae, made me wonder if maybe his daddy had been a jade man, too. What kind of an axe did he have to grind?

  I didn’t even want to contemplate the thought. At least not now. The frequent stops to catch up on the note-taking were getting harder for me to handle. I should have loaned him my tape recorder. I leaned my head back on the sofa again and fought
to keep my eyes open.

  The doorbell’s ring startled us all. Florie shot from her chair, but the door burst open before she reached it. Max Holman strode in the room, loaded for bear.

  Twelve

  “Thea, what’s going on?” Before I could even register his presence, he’d pulled me to my feet and wrapped his big arms around me. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, still semi-stupefied by surprise at his sudden appearance. His rough chin scratched blissfully across my cheek.

  He pulled away, looked into my eyes for a moment, then gave me one of those quick head-to-toe surveys. With a bewildered shake of his head, he said, “You look awful!”

  “Thanks a lot.” I found myself grinning like an idiot, delighted to hear this typical Maxian greeting. How could I have imagined for one minute that I didn’t remember what he looked like? The eight months since we’d seen each other disappeared in a flash. “You look pretty awful yourself.”

  His dark-brown hair was tangled and a hard hat had left a matted flat crease that circled his head. A streak of grease ran through one of his Tom Selleck eyebrows, and the ever-present dark beard-shadow had turned into visible stubble. Still, his very presence seemed to dominate the room.

  He looked down at himself with guilty surprise. “Guess I should have changed,” he muttered, glancing behind to see if his boots had tracked up the floor. “Buster came straight to the rig from town, said something had happened here and you might need help.”

  “It’s been a nightmare, Max. Phoebe, Phoebe Zimmerman, a girl I met, is dead,” I said, hopelessly unable to condense everything he needed to know into a few sentences.

  “Murdered,” Dwayne said, ready to take control again. “In this one’s room,” he jerked his head at me.

  Max eyed him coldly. “And you are…?”

  “Officer Dwayne Muldrew, police.”

  “Where’s the Sheriff?”

  “Out of town,” Dwayne bit the words off.

  “Can’t this wait?” Max demanded. “It’s the middle of the night. She’s in no shape to talk now. She needs to get some sleep.”