by Harper Lin
“Excuse me?”
“You think your investigations have gone completely unnoticed? You’re always poking around asking questions. This is a small town. People talk. You’ve developed a reputation as the nosy newcomer.”
“Small-town gossip is less important to me than solving a murder,” I snapped. Inside, though, I felt less confident. I should have realized Cheerville was a gossip mill. In fact, I already knew that. People were always telling me how so-and-so didn’t keep up their garden and such-and-such a person at the senior center hogged all the chocolate custard. It had all been so banal that I didn’t think it could affect me.
“Thank you for the warning,” I added. “I’ll try to be more careful. Have you found out anything?”
“We’re looking into it.”
I rubbed my temples. This guy was going to give me a headache.
“So what have you been doing exactly?” I asked.
“We’ve been checking on why he moved to Cheerville. A couple of people at the country club said he mentioned having family in town and that was why he had moved here. Wasn’t too specific, but he mentioned it during at least two different conversations, so it was obviously important to him. Thing is, we can’t find any relatives. In fact, we can’t find any close living relatives at all. He had an older sister who died many years ago. Neither the sister nor Garfield had any children. We’re extending the search to cousins but so far haven’t found any in this state.”
“Have you found out any more about his movements?”
“He hasn’t been around very long, so no. The country club appears to be the only group he joined, although he had taken an application to join the Cheerville Historical Society.”
An application he never got to turn in. Poor fellow.
“Did he make any friends at either institution?”
“Not that we can see. There was a new members’ mixer two days before he was murdered. He was invited but didn’t go. Apparently, it’s quite a boozer. I guess he heard that and decided not to tempt himself.”
“Have you investigated Chief Running Horse?”
“Oh, you found out he sold Garfield a house here in town, did you? We looked into the transaction, and all of it is aboveboard. I don’t trust Chief Running Horse, though. We’ve done some background checking on him. Can’t find any dirt on the guy, but my police instincts say he’s dirty.”
“I’m glad your police instincts can detect the blatantly obvious.”
I heard Grimal mutter something on the other end of the line. After a moment, he said, “Have you found out anything?”
I could hear the reluctance in his voice, the mortal fear that I would one-up him once again.
A well-founded fear, of course.
I gave him the time and date that Garfield signed into and out of the historical society and said that I “happened to remember” the maître d’ had a ledger with a guest list for the charity dinner. “You should look into that,” I told him.
Instead of a sullen response worthy of my grandson when he was getting an adolescent hormone hit, I instead got a long burst of mocking laughter.
“Well, of course we checked on that!” he said before letting out another long laugh. “That’s basic police procedure. We checked that first thing. You really should stay in your lane.”
I flushed red. There was nothing I hated more than unearned arrogance.
“Have you made any progress narrowing down suspects?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“The list didn’t indicate who was left-handed,” he said.
“Very funny. Question some witnesses. Look for who was sitting near the back so they would have a good view of Garfield and could slip away unseen. Look at the table arrangement. Talk to the waiters. You know, basic police procedure.”
I hung up. Ugh, that man drove me crazy!
Why was it that arrogance was almost always inversely proportional to competence? My late husband was one of the most competent men I had ever met, and he had not a trace of arrogance. He had confidence and a self-assured air that made him a natural leader. He could step up to a squad of gung-ho Marines and, in a few words, get them to follow him anywhere. He never boasted and never lorded it over anyone. He didn’t need to.
If only everyone could be like that.
I spent the rest of the afternoon doing more background work online, searching for anything about the victim that could hint at why he had been murdered. I came up with nothing. Detective work, like spy work, required patience. Sometimes, long stretches of intense work turned up nothing. As the sky grew dark outside, I called Albert. Maybe I would get lucky and discover he had found out something.
“Hello, Albert. It’s your least favorite little old lady. Have you discovered anything?”
“Huh?”
“Did you find out anything about the man who tried to buy a drink for Garfield?” I asked as patiently as I could.
“Garfield doesn’t drink. He eats lasagna.” The guy broke out into giggles.
It took me a minute to catch the reference. “I’m not talking about the cartoon cat, you moron. You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?”
“Whaaaah? No, not at all. I’m just, like, chilling.”
“Did you check the Cheerville Gazette?”
“Um, sure. Didn’t find nothing.”
“This is important, Albert. A man’s dead, and the murderer is a member of your country club. He could kill again.”
“Uh, yeah. I’ll get right on it.”
I sighed and hung up. This zombie was going to be no help at all. Why did I have to rely on help from amateurs?
A few minutes later, I got a call from another amateur. At least he wasn’t an idiot.
“Hey, pretty lady. I had a very productive time at the country club. I think I have a lead on the murderer.”
My breath caught. Could I be so lucky?
Ten
Octavian and I met at the Candlelit Lounge.
I had picked the place because it was quiet and exclusive, the kind of restaurant where the rich set from the country club would go.
I also picked it because it was somewhere Garfield had gone. Chief Running Horse had taken him there after he’d clinched the house deal.
It was one of those subdued, dimly lit spots with white tablecloths, wood paneling, and oil paintings so dark you could barely see what they depicted.
And yes, there were candles. Not enough candles, mind you. Octavian discovered that when he walked right by my table.
I had arrived first, asked for a table well away from the other diners, and sat down to wait.
Octavian came in a few minutes later, squinted as he surveyed the room, then started walking around looking for me.
I felt tempted to call out to him, but no one in this place spoke above a hushed whisper, so I felt embarrassed.
He came to my table, looked right at me, then walked on.
“Octavian,” I called, getting over my reticence. Immediately, several other diners turned to me and frowned.
Octavian turned. I waved. He squinted at me and drew closer.
“Oh, it is you,” he said and sat down.
“It isn’t that dark in here.”
He gave me an abashed smile. “Age. My night vision isn’t what it used to be.”
Good thing I hadn’t taken him on my late-night break-in at the country club. “So how did your investigations at the country club go?”
He had come straight from there. I could tell because he smelled of cigarettes. Octavian didn’t smoke, but he had obviously endured the country club lounge just to help me with my case. What a darling.
“I suffered through many a boring conversation and inhaled enough secondhand smoke to kill an iguana, so I hope you appreciate this,” he said.
“Of course I do. By the way, do iguanas require a lot of smoke to kill them?”
“Indeed they do.”
“What have you found out?”
We were interrupted by a waiter co
ming to take our order. I ordered a steak. Investigations always gave me a hearty appetite. Octavian squinted at the menu for a minute and eventually gave up, ordering the same, along with a carafe of mineral water.
Once the waiter was gone, we got down to business.
“For a while, I turned up nothing. I did rounds of drinks with various people. Everyone was happy to welcome me, and that welcoming generally included alcohol. That’s why I ordered mineral water just now. I’m still a bit tipsy. There was a lot of talk about business in the city. While most of the guys are retired, old habits die hard, and they’re still looking for connections.”
“Why would they be looking for connections?”
“Networking never ends for some people. One mentioned a son who wants to get in my line of work. Another asked if I knew a good estate attorney. It’s all kind of a test, you see. They want to know if I’ll be useful to them. I guess it was different with your job. People had their orders. Everyone knew what everyone else was supposed to do.”
“We had to make local contacts.”
“Ah, so you know about networking. Anyway, after a couple of drinks, people started to relax and began to talk, mostly about poor James Garfield. It doesn’t bother you that I mention his name, does it?”
I stared at him, baffled. “Why would it?”
Octavian looked uncomfortable. “Well, you know … it’s the same first name as your late husband.”
“Oh.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me. I thought about it a moment and realized it didn’t make any difference. When you had seen as much as I had, little things like that didn’t get to you.
“It’s fine, Octavian. What did they say?”
“Oh, they said all the right things, acting shocked about a killing in their midst and concerned about the killer still being at large, but that was mostly for show. After a while, they revealed their true colors. Started joking about how he had refused all their drinks. One of the guys does great impressions, and he did an impression of Garfield acting all flustered as everyone drank around him. That got a good laugh.”
“They were laughing about a man getting murdered at their own club?”
Octavian made a face. “Sad to say, yes they did. Of course, it all shook them up a bit, but none of them wanted to show it, and so they joked about it.”
I nodded. Operatives in the field did the same. We all joked about the bullet that knocked our hat off or the bad guy who had done a funny dance as we shot him. It was a way to defuse fear. We never joked about one of our own getting it, though. The gentlemen at the country club lacked a certain esprit de corps.
“Did you meet anyone who fit the general description?”
“A few. I also steered the conversation around to cars. Mercedes are all too common in that bunch. This is going to take some more digging.”
I pulled out my phone and showed him the photos of the maître d’s ledger. Beside each name was a table number, and another page in the ledger had a drawing of the meeting hall with all the tables and their numbers. I told him about Albert and the man trying to buy a drink for James Garfield. Octavian listened, entranced, at my account of breaking into the country club.
“I knew I saw something in you,” he whispered, putting a hand on mine.
“Don’t get frisky,” I said, my giggle undercutting any sort of authority I tried to put in my voice. “We have a murder to solve. Now look, Albert said the man sat near the rear. I would say one of these nine tables.”
My finger traced a circle around the tables at the back third of the room. Some weren’t very close to the door, but I figured it was best to cast the net wide.
“One of those is ours,” Octavian said, “and there were no single men sitting at our table.”
“There were the Prices, and then there was that other couple. The man looked like a doctor.”
Octavian sat up straight, an eager gleam in his eye. “Oh yes, I remember them. As a matter of fact, he fits the general description.”
“Hold your horses. He got there too late. He and his wife only sat down a few minutes before the speech started, and he didn’t leave the table before I did.”
Octavian deflated. “Oh. Good point.”
“Don’t worry, you’re being a great help. So that leaves eight tables. Let’s make a list of men who were at those tables, and then we’ll do a Google image search for all their names, trying to match the physical description Albert gave us. If we don’t get images, perhaps we can get other information like age or place of work.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The plan had to wait until after a delicious yet horribly overpriced meal. After we were done, we went to have a coffee at the Tic Toc Café. I picked it because the noise would keep other people from hearing what we were doing. According to Grimal, I had a bad reputation as a snoop that I needed to live down. The café was also well lit. I needed Octavian to be able to see what he was doing.
We got a table in a far corner next to a handsome old grandfather clock. My companion, another handsome old grandfather, sat right next to it. We ordered two coffees, and Octavian pulled out a notepad and pen. I smiled. The notepad was new. He had obviously bought it as part of his sleuthing kit. Too bad he hadn’t bought a deerstalker hat. He would have looked cute in that.
“All right,” he said, acting very businesslike. “I heard a lot of names while I was there. Why don’t you start reading out names, and I’ll write them down. Then we can search for them online.”
We wrote down all the names, getting a total of thirty-eight people, well over half the guests at those tables. It turned out most of the men hadn’t brought their wives. Most likely, the ladies had suffered through previous speeches full of golf jokes and decided to get facials or give their poodles a perm or whatever rich ladies did. Three men, Octavian had met personally, and he said they didn’t match the description, so that left thirty-five.
“I brought my—” Octavian got cut off by the loud ringing, clanging, bonging, and cuckooing of all the clocks striking nine at the same time. The grandfather clock next to poor Octavian was the loudest clock in the place, and the poor dear leaned away from it, covering his ears until the cacophony stopped. I could actually feel it vibrate my insides. Explosions did that too.
Once we could hear again, I said, “Do go on.”
“I—”
A little bird popped out of a clock over my head and went, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”
“You’re late,” Octavian growled.
He looked around, scowling at all the clocks as if daring them to interrupt him again. They appeared to be cowed into submission by this, because none of them made any more noise other than their incessant ticking.
“Anyway,” he began again, “I brought my laptop just in case we had to do any internet research.”
He pulled it out of a briefcase he carried. We cleared a space on the table and got to work.
It was a slow process. Some faces we found immediately, from either newspaper articles or pieces in business magazines or company web pages. Others were harder to find, especially those with common names. You know how many Bob Millers there are in the world? Plenty, and it took some time to narrow them down.
Finally, we had eliminated as many guests as we could. We were left with twelve names. Three of them had a close enough general appearance that they could be our man. Five more weren’t very close, but we didn’t eliminate them because I didn’t fully trust Albert’s observation skills and memory. Four more, we hadn’t been able to get images of at all. Not everyone had a lot of information about them on the internet. I suspected these were older club members who had retired before making much of a digital footprint. I couldn’t be sure, however, so I left them on the list.
Then we got creative. Octavian tried searching for websites that contained the names of both James Garfield and each of the suspects, but he came up with nothing. Then we looked for public records of past convictions for each name, and besides
a couple of divorce notices, again we came up with nothing. I even checked to see if any of the men were members of the Cheerville Historical Society. You never know, maybe it was a crime of passion between two men competing for the hand of the stern schoolmarm. No luck.
At last, I leaned back with a sigh.
“It looks like we’ve done all we can for tonight,” I said.
“Now what? We still have twelve men to pick through.”
I smiled. “Octavian, in this line of work, sometimes you have to keep company with people you don’t like, people a bit different than you.”
“Oh, we may have had different careers, but I wouldn’t say we’re apples and oranges. Besides, I find you excellent company.”
“I didn’t mean me, silly. I mean Albert,” I said.
“The stoned waiter crashing at the country club?”
“Yes. It’s time we had a meeting of the minds with that boy, assuming he has a mind. We have to show him these images and see if he recognizes the man who ordered wine for Garfield. If not, he can still be a great help, assuming we can keep him off the weed for long enough.”
Now it was Octavian’s turn to smile. “Leave that to me, my dear. Leave that to me.”
Eleven
By a stroke of luck, the next day was Albert’s day off. He asked us to meet him at Dips ‘n’ Donuts, which I had to ask directions for. I had never heard of it.
When Octavian and I got to the address he gave us, I could see why. It was out on a county road, well past the city limits. A little building that looked like it had once been a gas station was painted with garish psychedelic colors. On the roof was a big tie-dyed doughnut, at least six feet in diameter, slowly spinning on the end of a metal beam.
“How do you tie-dye a doughnut?” Octavian asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. The door opened, and a pair of twentysomethings slouched out, followed by a poof of marijuana smoke. “But I think we’re about to find out.”
“Do you think your friend invited us here as a way of making us leave him alone?”
