“You’ve seen the abomination they’ve foisted on us across the road? The new superstore? Well, some of us are fed up. We’ve had enough. They sneaked the superstore past us, but there’s this shopping mall they’re trying to put up out south of town, and we’re fighting it tooth and nail.”
“Good for you! I’ve been getting more and more upset about how much Hillsburg has changed, just in the few years I’ve been gone.”
Hannah nodded vigorously. “Fine old buildings torn down, for no reason at all! Good farmland turned into a parking lot! It’s a crime, that’s what it is. Every town looking exactly alike—well, we don’t need it here in Hillsburg. Kevin agreed, incidentally—even contributed to the cause. And we’ve got a good shot at stopping them, too. …”
She expounded on her theme for some time, but with Alan and me as audience, she was preaching to the choir. When she finally slowed down and I could get a word in edgewise, I said, “Well, I agree with every word you say, and I wish you all the luck. But you said you had only a little time, and I had some things to ask you—”
“Oh, Lord, I got on my soapbox, didn’t I? Sorry. And I really do have to get busy. The meeting about the mall is tonight, here, and I’ve got lots of paperwork to deal with beforehand. So how can I help you?”
“I’m just trying to get a picture of Kevin’s last few weeks. He was a good friend, and I feel awful that I lost touch with him and let him die without a chance to say good-bye.”
Hannah sobered. “I know how you feel. It came as a shock to me, too. We all thought he was healthy as a horse. I hadn’t seen much of him myself—too busy organizing the antimall forces. And then all of a sudden, there he was in the hospital.”
“But—I must be confused. Somebody told me he thought you’d been over to Kevin’s workshop just a few days before he got sick. Ordering a new window, I thought he said?”
“Oh, good grief, you’re right and I’m wrong. I did talk to him about the possibility of doing one for a friend. We didn’t settle anything definite, though. I’d forgotten all about it. Who on earth told you? I didn’t think I’d mentioned it to anyone.”
“I’m not sure. One of the other neighbors, I think.”
“There aren’t any other neighbors, really, except that crazy man in the trailer.” Her voice sharpened. “I’d be careful about him, if I were you. He’s a menace, and that pigsty he lives in! A disgrace to the countryside, that’s what he is! I wouldn’t believe too much he tells you.” She shook her head and glanced at her watch. I had to take the hint.
“Yes, we really must go. Do you mind if I come back sometime and just talk about Kevin? I’d call first, of course.”
“Any time, but do call.” She had recovered her gracious manner. “I’m going to be out a lot, drumming up support for the cause and talking to lawyers, and all. Nice to meet both of you.”
We were shooed out the door, quite nicely but very efficiently. I backed out of the driveway and drove out of sight before stopping. I stretched back, my arms stiff against the steering wheel.
“Well, now what? That sure didn’t get us anywhere.”
“A lady with a mission,” said Alan a little dryly. “Missionaries are often somewhat—monotonous, shall we say?”
“I liked her.”
“My dear, so did I, though she got a little shrill on the subject of Jerry, didn’t she? I simply wished she would moderate her enthusiasm a trifle, even though I agree with her point of view.
“Now,” he added briskly, “shall we go on to the next person on the list? I’m beginning to get very interested in this wild-goose chase of yours, Dorothy.”
7
THE next person on the list, we decided after a quick conference, was either the attending doctor in Kevin’s last illness or the police chief, whichever could be found easily on a Saturday afternoon.
“Let’s try the police chief first,” I suggested. “At least we know where to look for him. And if he isn’t working today, we can try the doctor.”
So we drove back into town, where the police station, thank heaven, was still where it had always been.
Yes, the chief was in. Yes, we could see him. Names, please?
Here, at least, was a place where Alan’s title might be useful. “Dorothy Martin. And Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, from the county of Belleshire, England.”
“You don’t say. Official business?”
“No,” said Alan firmly. “Merely a courtesy call.”
The desk sergeant scratched his head and spoke into the telephone. I frowned at Alan.
“My dear, I cannot operate under false pretenses,” he said quietly. “And I am, I remind you, not the chief constable anymore.”
“It never hurts to throw your weight around a little,” I whispered back.
Which just goes to show how wrong I can be.
We were given visitors’ badges. I was a little surprised at that formality, but Hillsburg tries to keep its civic departments up-to-date. When we were shown back to the office occupied by the chief, though, it seemed very small-town. It was a shabby, homey place—imitation knotty pine paneling, scarred wooden desk covered with pictures of the chief’s family. I glanced at them, looked more closely, and then looked at the chief’s name badge with dawning recognition.
“Lacey! Darryl Lacey! My word, I wouldn’t have known you, but your son looks exactly the way you did in fourth grade.”
He grinned. “He does, doesn’t he? Now me, I’ve put on a little weight. And lost a little hair. But I was sure you’d figure out who I was, Mrs. Martin. What’re you doing back in town?”
He was bald as an egg, indeed resembled an egg: He could have played Humpty Dumpty in any production of Alice in Wonderland.
“Oh, we’ve been meaning to come for a visit for some time,” I prevaricated. “Darryl, this is my husband, Alan Nesbitt. Alan, Darryl was one of my students, oh, years ago, now.”
I beamed at both of them. Alan extended his hand. Darryl took it and said stiffly, “How do you do, sir.”
Uh-oh.
“Won’t you sit down?”
He was being very formal now. Alan tried to set him at ease. “Mr. Lacey, I hope you don’t mind our dropping in on you like this. I’m sure you’re very busy.”
“Not as busy as all that. We don’t go in for all the spit and polish that you guys do in your country. Just a rough and ready small-town police force, that’s all we have here. Drunk and disorderly, auto theft, domestic violence, a bank robbery now and then. We manage.”
“Er—the students give you no trouble, then?”
“That’s what the campus police are for. We deal with ’em when they get into trouble off campus. Which they usually don’t. And if it’s drugs you’re thinking of, we don’t have too much problem with that here, not yet, no matter what you’ve heard about Americans.”
Worse and worse. I stepped in. “Darryl—oh, dear, I suppose I should call you Chief Lacey, but—”
“You call me anything you want, Mrs. Martin.” There was just the faintest emphasis on the you. He had turned away from Alan and addressed only me.
“Darryl, then, since I knew you when you were a pup. We really don’t want to take up your time, but I wondered what you could tell me about the last few weeks of Kevin Cassidy’s life. I understand you were a friend of his. I was so sorry to hear of his death.” I repeated my story of concern and guilt feelings, a story that, however true, was beginning to sound very thin to me. I hoped Darryl found it more convincing.
“Yeah, he was a great old guy—a real character. He even gave me some money once. You know about those ‘loans’ of his?”
“Yes, Frank and I borrowed some once, ourselves. He was a generous man, Kevin.”
“I guess there’s not hardly anybody in town didn’t borrow a little from the prof at one time or another. I was taking a course from him, back when I was a freshman, and I wanted to buy a car so bad I could taste it. He advanced me the money. Gave me a lecture along with it, about be
ing careful, not drinking and driving, all that. I don’t s’pose I’d have listened to it coming from anybody else, but he had a way of sounding like God, you know?”
“I do indeed. I didn’t know you went to the university, Darryl.”
“Dropped out after a couple of years and went into the police. I’ve never been sorry. College wasn’t for me, but I enjoyed some of it. ’Specially the prof’s course. I don’t know what a world-famous guy like him was doing teaching freshman biology, but he sure made it interesting.”
“He insisted on teaching that course now and then. Used to say he liked to keep in touch with the real world, the people who didn’t think biology was the be-all and end-all of life. So did you see much of him the last few years?”
“Not a lot. I used to drop in once in a while. Kind of worried about him living out there all by himself, you know? He wasn’t getting any younger. And I went out once, just before he got sick, to see if he could make me one of those glass things he’d started doing. Present for my wife. You know about the glass stuff?”
“I’ve seen a few examples of his work. He was a real artist.”
“Yeah, who’d have thought a guy could take up something new, at his age, and be so good at it?”
“He was a remarkable man. How did he seem when you saw him?”
“Fine. We had a cold spell in August, and I went out mostly to make sure he was keeping warm enough, but it was almost hot out there in that workshop of his, what with the soldering iron and all, and he was working away, happy as a clam. Didn’t seem sick at all. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard he had pneumonia.”
“A soldering iron?”
“You put the glass together with solder. I don’t know how it works, exactly, but there was a big reel of the stuff on his workbench. Along with copper foil and lots of different colors of glass—gosh, it was pretty. I feel real bad he never got a chance to finish mine. And who told you I was a friend of his?”
The question came so suddenly I had no answer ready. “Umm—one of the neighbors, I think—”
“He didn’t have any close neighbors, nobody to see who was coming and going. Except that crazy guy in the woods. It was him, wasn’t it?”
“Really, I—”
“Never mind. I suppose you don’t want me to know what he said about me. He doesn’t like the police much, and the feeling’s mutual. One of these days he’s going to go too far with that squirrel rifle of his and kill somebody. He’s a menace.”
I should have kept my mouth shut, but I couldn’t help protesting. “Oh, Darryl, he’s harmless enough, surely? A little eccentric, not terribly bright, but—”
“Eccentric! He’s crazy as a coot! He tell you about Vietnam?”
“A little.”
“He tell you he was in the psych ward for a couple of years after he got back?”
I didn’t answer.
“No, I didn’t think so. Look, I feel kind of sorry for the guy, myself, but he’s more’n a few plays short of a football game. The gooks really messed up his head when he was a POW, see. He tried to kill a guard when he was in the loony bin, and he can’t be trusted. He just goes haywire sometimes, and he’s way too good a shot to be safe. I’ve seen him shoot a running mouse from twenty, thirty feet away. I wouldn’t go out there anymore if I were you, Mrs. Martin.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question about Kevin, but the radio on Darryl’s shoulder went into action. I couldn’t hear what the crackling voice said, but Darryl got up in a hurry. “Sorry, Mrs. Martin, but I gotta go. Nice to see you again.” Without so much as a nod to Alan he sped out the door, leaving us to find our own way out of the station.
We drove back to the hotel in silence, but when we got to the room I had to deal with it.
“Alan, I’m so sorry. I should have realized—”
“Never mind, love. It’s only natural that your old friends should resent me. It’s all right.”
“But Darryl isn’t an old friend. He’s just a child I taught. And still acting pretty childish, if you ask me.”
“He was afraid I was going to lord it over him, as the senior officer in an English police force. It was his inferiority complex at work. I’m afraid we’ve developed a worldwide reputation as snobs about our policing methods. And quite justified, too.”
“Your reputation, or your snobbery?”
“Both, actually.”
I giggled at that, but I wasn’t quite ready to let it go. “I don’t know what you must think of the hick town I lived in all my life.”
“Now who’s developing an inferiority complex? Come on, let’s sit down and work out what we’ve got, if anything.”
I dug the notebook out from under the stack of sweatshirts, but there was discouragingly little to put in it. Under the heading “Who was present?” I added the names Jerry had given us, or the descriptions where we didn’t know names. And we were able to add a little information to the “Interviews” section.
“Okay. Police chief. Doesn’t like you.”
“Irrelevant,” Alan objected.
“Maybe. Maybe not. It stays. Called on Kevin shortly before he died.”
“Borrowed money from him,” Alan contributed.
“Are you still harping on that money? I don’t see how it could have anything to do with anything.”
“If his attitude toward me stays in, the money stays in.”
I sighed and made the note. “And he took one course from Kevin. Relevant?”
“Probably not, but write it down. At this stage we have no idea what is important and what isn’t.”
“I suspect nobody; I suspect everybody,” I chanted in an Inspector Clouseau voice.
“Exactly. On to Mrs. Schneider.”
There wasn’t much to say about her, either. A pharmacist by profession, a former student of Kevin’s, a fanatic about keeping development out of Hillsburg.
“I wonder,” asked Alan, “how much money the professor gave her for this project of hers.”
“She didn’t say.”
“No. But she must need quite a lot. Attorneys who can take on mall developers with any chance of winning don’t come cheap.”
“I don’t see why you think it’s important, but we could ask her, I suppose.”
“If there’s no other way to find out. Would there be public records?”
“If the protest group has officially registered as a not-for-profit organization, I suppose there might be. Though if Kevin gave her the money and she then plowed it into the protest fund, it would probably just be listed as her contribution.”
“It’s worth looking into, on Monday when the records office opens. Where would it be in an American city?”
“County courthouse, I imagine. I really don’t know a thing about it, but that’d be the place to start looking. And this is the county seat, so it’ll be easy, if boring.”
“Police work,” said Alan didactically, “is often boring. Almost all of the time, in fact. The other fraction of the time it’s entirely too exciting. When, for example, one deals with unbalanced people carrying rifles.”
Sighing again, I added Jerry’s name to my list. If there was too little to say about either Darryl or Mrs. Schneider, there was too much about Jerry.
“Rifleman; excellent shot,” I wrote. “Alan, I still insist that has nothing to do with anything. Kevin wasn’t shot.”
“Why are you so partial to our gun-toting friend? Who, I might add, has attitudes toward women that usually infuriate you.”
“I don’t know, exactly. Yes, he’s a male chauvinist, and he’s not very clean or very bright. Not the sort I’d usually want for a friend. But I feel sorry for him. And he likes cats.”
“Neither of which consideration disqualifies him as a suspect.”
“No. What else should I write down?”
“Belligerent. Nearest neighbor. Received gifts from Professor Cassidy. Perhaps money? Probably mentally disturbed. Large and apparently strong. Dislikes a
uthority figures.”
I dutifully recorded it all. “All right, all right. But if you get all that, I get this.” And added: “Devoted to Kevin; his faithful protector.”
Alan read the whole account over and shook his head. “It’s little enough for a day’s work. Should we try to seek out one of the other possibilities?”
“Not if I get a vote. We’re too muddled. We need to let the thing sit for a while. Anyway, the stores will still be open for another couple of hours, and I want to hit that mystery bookstore!”
Alan grinned, ostentatiously checked his wallet, and followed me out the door.
The London mystery bookshops don’t always carry a great selection of American authors, and when they do, the books cost a lot more than they would in America. I was way behind on Barbara D’Amato and Carolyn Hart and Jane Langton and Carole Nelson Douglas and a score of others. By the time we left the store I had enough reading material to last me for weeks.
“It’ll cost a young fortune to ship those back to England,” Alan complained.
“Not to mention several pounds of tigers in various forms.”
He said no more.
Right after dinner I started on a book by an author new to me. It was set in a nursing home and concerned skulduggery among the staff, who were, sometimes with the help of money-grubbing relatives, defrauding the elderly residents left and right. Despite the fact that it kept me awake until the wee hours, I woke bright and early Sunday morning with a brand-new idea.
“Alan, we have to see Ms. Carmichael in the morning. First thing.”
“Very well. If we can get an appointment, of course. Am I allowed to ask why?”
“Not yet,” I said smugly. “I have an idea, that’s all. I want to see if it pans out before I tell you about it.”
8
WE went to two church services that Sunday, an excessive number in my opinion. We were up early enough to hit the first service at St. Paul’s, the lovely old Episcopal church where I’d been baptized and confirmed and married, the conservative Anglo-Catholic church I’d loved all my life.
Killing Cassidy Page 6
