The Case of the Missing Department Head

by David Staats

  The Case

  of the Missing

  Department Head

  Books by David Staats:

  Novel:

  The Case of the Missing

  Department Head

  Translation:

  The Monk’s Wedding

  The Case of the Missing Department Head

  A Walter Dure “Hard Case” Mystery

  Version 1.0

  David Staats

  Bathysphere BooksTM

  An imprint of Newtext PublishingTM

  Newark, Delaware

  Copyright © 2018 David Staats

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by

  Bathysphere BooksTM

  “High Pressure Fiction”SM

  An imprint of Newtext PublishingTM

  ISBN: 978-1-946797-01-8

  Cover Design: Liam Relph

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is coincidental.

  And it came to pass that when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.

  1.

  The events here recorded happened not so long ago. In the Town of Canterbury, in the County of Essex, in the Commonwealth of Pennsyltucky, a man and his wife, or, more reflective of the true state of affairs, a woman and her husband, lived in a residential development called Sunderly Chase.

  The woman, Tiffany Houlihan, held a responsible position as the head of the county library system. Her husband worked part of the year taking his Hawaiian Shave-Ice concession trailer to fairs, beaches, etc., and during the winter didn’t seem to work at all. Undoubtedly Mrs. Houlihan pulled down a respectable salary, and nobody knew how much Mr. Houlihan netted from his shave-ice business, but it did seem something of a mystery how the Houlihans could afford a house in a development as upscale as Sunderly Chase, for it was the kind of neighborhood where, when a house changes hands, a mob of pick-up trucks and panel trucks will be parked in the driveway and spill out into the gently curving suburban street for the next three months, as carpenters, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, masons, painters, decorators, and landscapers redo the whole house.

  Some saw an explanation of this mystery in the fact that Mrs. Houlihan was a pooh-bah in the Reform Party and that somehow her political work combined with her government employment meant that she had a large surreptitious income. Others saw an explanation in the fact that the Houlihans had only one child, a son named Liam, and that they had sent him to public schools and the state university; thus they had not had the large child-rearing and educational expenses that most of their neighbors shouldered.

  Whatever the explanation, there was no gainsaying the fact that there they were, living in a large house among the local movers and shakers in one of the exclusive and upscale developments in the town.

  Mr. Houlihan was an odd bird. Not only was he nine years older than his wife, but he seemed to be prematurely aged. Once tall, he was now no more than middle height. Only fifty-one, he carried his large shaggy head drooping forward, and his gray hair made him look seventy. Whether standing or walking, he no longer straightened his legs fully, so that with his knees bent and his shoulders slumped, he looked something like an elongated letter “S.” Although he often puttered around in the backyard, he never seemed to accomplish anything other than to leave a mess.

  Like most, in fact nearly all, of the residents of Sunderly Chase, the Houlihans hired a lawn-mowing service – the lots were so large that it would be unreasonable to attempt to mow them with an ordinary riding mower. The Houlihans’ lot was unique in one respect: Mr. Houlihan was unwilling to eradicate the groundhogs that lived in his yard. There was even one family of the pudgy ground-dwellers living under the sun room at the back of the house, but mostly they had their dens around the borders of the yard where trees and shrubs sheltered their dens. This occasioned some resentment on the part of the neighbors, who did not like the foraging rodents coming into their yards to feed in the garden or dig holes in the lawn.

  On a Sunday evening, shortly before 7:30, Tiffany Houlihan took her customary seat in the entertainment room of that large house. With an automatic gesture, she half flung out her right hand, pressing the red button on the remote control which she had scooped up from the floor. After a moment, the large-screen television came to life.

  Advertisements were running. She settled into her chair, folding her left leg under her. She had seen that car dealer ad she didn’t know how many times. After that came on an ad for a new miracle drug that would turn any woman on the far side of middle age who was experiencing incontinence into a slender, smiling, dancing queen. The pleated dress which the actress in the ad wore flared out as she twirled around; it reached a stage where the flexile pleats approximated a Fibonacci spiral, then swirled back. A soothing male voice recited with racing rapidity, “Side effects may include edema pbguttyoe insomnia irritability increased risk of churgtgopel heart attacks and death.”

  She pressed the mute button.

  Just as the title screen for S.C.I. “Scientific Crime Investigation” came on, her husband snuck into the dim room, ducking slightly as if he were trying to avoid interfering with the light from an imaginary film projector. He sat at the very end of the sofa, several feet away from the chair in which his wife sat.

  “Tired of making a mess outdoors?” she said without looking at him. Neither expecting nor waiting for an answer, she unmuted the television.

  Soon both spouses were rapt in the mystery surrounding the death of a wealthy young woman who owned a horse farm.

  * * *

  As a general rule, subject to exceptions, Mondays in the law office of Walter Dure were clean, unwrinkled, fresh-smelling – a new start on a new week. On this Monday morning, Attorney Dure’s two employees, Kara, the secretary/paralegal, and Ralph, the general factotum, were in the reception area chatting.

  “Did you see last night’s S.C.I.?” asked Kara. She was in her early 30’s, and had blonde hair that hung down not quite collar length. It framed her round face, giving her something of a Dutch-boy appearance. Her body, appearing curvaceous in a sheath dress, was neither slender nor bulgy. She was all enthused about the episode of her favorite television program she had watched the night before.

  “Nah, I watched the game,” said Ralph, a muscular man in his late 30’s who had been running to fat for some years. He had short, light dun-colored hair, and his large, blue eyes seemed perpetually startled in his red face.

  “Oh, you missed it! It looked like the husband had killed the woman he had been having an affair with because she was going to go public with it and cause him to lose his job, not to mention probably cause a divorce.”

  “Cleveland . . . losers! . . . they made a double play. Okay. But they had to try and make it a triple play. They made an overthrow . . . the runner advanced to second. . . . Turned out he was the winning run.”

  “So the prosecution got this forensic botanist to prove that the wife had been out to the farm where the murder occurred by identifying pollen from her shoes.”

  “Yeah.” Ralph did not seem overly interested.

  “But then the defense said, big deal, pollen from sycamore trees is all over the place. But the husband and the wife lived in the city, so that seemed a little iffy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, get this: the prosecution gets a DNA analysis on the pollen and proves that it came from
one specific sycamore tree that was out on the farm. It turned out it was the wife who did it.”

  Attorney Dure brought his long, gray face out into the reception area. He had two sheets of yellow legal paper in his hand. He had to have heard the last thing that Kara, said.

  “What’s that about?” he asked.

  “S.C.I.,” said Kara. “I watched it last night.”

  “That’s a TV show?” asked Dure.

  “Right. Scientific Crime Investigation.”

  Dure smiled. In his shadowed face his smile gleamed like a campfire in a twilit meadow. “If it weren’t for the Fifth Amendment, he said, “there would be no scientific crime investigation.” He glanced over at Ralph. “Did you watch it too?”

  “Nah,” said Ralph, “I watched the game,” with a dismissive gesture of his hand.

  Since Dure was their boss, neither Kara nor Ralph felt entitled to demand an explanation for Dure’s curious statement about the Fifth Amendment. But their expressions registered surprised skepticism in spite of themselves.

  Taking note of this, Dure said, “The Fifth Amendment is a gem and a jewel: ‘No person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.’ In countries that don’t have the Fifth Amendment – or something like it – the police and the government get lazy. Why go to all the trouble of gathering and analyzing evidence when it is so much easier to get a confession? And a confession can’t be defeated. If a defendant admits he did it, that’s the end of the case. It’s only the Fifth Amendment, or some provision of law like it, that forces the police to investigate crime and prove a defendant guilty. So, no Fifth Amendment, no S.C.I.”

  Kara nodded appreciatively. “Makes sense,” she said.

  “Where there’s no Fifth Amendment, the police become so dependent on confessions, that torture is almost inevitable. God help you if you get arrested in Cuba – or in Iran or Egypt.”

  Dure gave Kara the sheets of paper he had in his hand. “Type these up, would you please?”

  * * *

  It was the morning of the fifth Saturday in May. One side of the Houlihans’ long driveway was parked with cars, and more cars were parked at the side of the street in front of the Houlihans’ house. There was one Cadillac CTS among them, but mostly there were Beemers, Audis, Lexuses, Mercedes . . . a few Acuras. Lots of vanity plates: REFORM1, IH8MYEX, STEELES . . ..

  Inside, some thirty people crammed the large living room. They were sitting not only on the sofa and the upholstered chairs, but on the arms of the sofa and on a number of dining room chairs and folding chairs which had been rounded up from elsewhere in the house and pressed into service for the occasion. At one end of the room a man sat at a folding table facing the assemblage.

  “Alright,” he said. “We have nominees for Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and Vice-chair. Looks like everyone is running unopposed. Maybe we could just declare the slate elected by acclamation, and not waste time with a vote on each office.”

  “Mr. Chairman!” said Mrs. Houlihan, rising. “I nominate Phyllis Steen for the office of Vice-chair.”

  A murmur ran through the assemblage. Some exclamations could be heard clearly. “What!” “Who?” “I thought it was all set.”

  The man at the card table cleared his throat. After a moment, he said, “Is there a second?”

  “I second the nomination!” rang out a woman’s voice, resonant with enthusiasm. At this, even more murmuring.

  “Okay, then,” said the man. “It’s been moved and seconded.” With a note of annoyance in his voice he asked, “Are there any more nominations?”

  After twenty seconds of silence he said, “The chair will entertain a motion to elect the Chair, Treasurer and Secretary by acclamation.”

  “So moved!”

  “Second!”

  “All in favor?”

  A chorus of “ayes” filled the room.

  “Carried,” said the man. “Now, in accordance with tradition, those who seconded the nominations will have three minutes to speak on behalf of their candidate. Then we’ll pass out ballots for the vice-chair election.”

  Near the front of the room, the slate candidate for Vice-Chair, Rhys Parker, stood off to the side, to the left of the folding table. Dressed in a well-fitting, beige-colored suit of good fabric, he had short, dark hair, was at most ten pounds overweight, and had a somewhat sweaty, oily appearance. He was staring in the direction of Mrs. Houlihan. Perhaps he was staring at her. She, however, was directing her attention elsewhere. His face gradually became more and more red. The chairman said something and Parker turned to look down the room at the woman who had seconded his nomination.

  The woman at whom he was gazing, having been recognized by the chair, stood and began, “I am proud to have seconded the nomination of Rhys Parker for the office of Vice-chairman of the Essex County Committee of the Reform Party.” She went on to give an uninspired, rather pro-forma endorsement. The impression she made was not so much that her support was lukewarm as that she was unprepared.

  Next, the woman who had seconded the nomination of Phyllis Steen gave an impassioned endorsement ending with a plea that those present please, please, vote for a hard worker and the future of the party.

  Slips of paper were passed out to serve as ballots. Steen prevailed over Parker 24 to 8.

  Rhys Parker’s entire face was now as red as the few blotches of late acne on his cheek. He stormed across the front of the room, rudely jostling a woman in passing, and grabbed a man by his forearm. He pulled the man out of the living room into the adjacent dining room.

  “I can’t believe it!” he said. “Why? Why the hell did they do that? Everybody knew I was only standing for the position because no one else wanted it. If anyone had said anything, I would have dropped out.”

  “It was low,” said the man.

  “I am really, really pissed,” said Rhys Parker. “Tiffany . . . Tiffany . . . I just can’t believe it!”

  * * *

  By 12:30, nearly everyone had left. Rhys Parker followed Mrs. Houlihan into the kitchen.

  “Tiffany – ” he began.

  “Mr. Parker!” she said, interrupting him, “what can I do for you?” She said it brightly, as if she were a waitress trying for a fat tip. Through the kitchen windows, Mr. Houlihan could be seen in the backyard wearing a pair of old jeans and a stretched out tee shirt, sawing a stick of lumber lying across two saw horses.

  “Tiffany,” he said. “You can’t . . . what was? . . . what . . . what . . .?”

  “It’s over, Rhys,” she said. “Didn’t you get the message?”

  He stared at her, his chest heaving.

  She returned his gaze. She stood erect but trembled imperceptibly. Perhaps she felt handicapped in the situation by having to hold in her hands the plates she had brought in from the living room. Her lips, having lost half of their coating of lipstick during the course of the morning, appeared thin and worn.

  In his eyes a little moisture was collecting at the lower rims. After a long moment he spoke. “Cold. You are cold,” he said. “You should hope there’s no such thing as karma.” He sneered at her, turned and stalked out of the house.

  * * *

  It was a Thursday morning, and as usual, it was quiet on the fifth floor of the County Services Building, where Tiffany Houlihan presided over the County Library Services Department, her fiefdom. In the large, carpeted open area, where the “peons” sat at open desks, without even cubicles for privacy, sounded a few hushed telephone conversations, some rustling of papers, the occasional opening and closing of a desk drawer. Mrs. Houlihan’s private office, located along the back wall, had a large window facing this open area; everyone was aware that she might at any time be looking out and observing them.

  She was talking on the telephone. Her chalk-white fingers with their bright red nail polish were wrapped around the old-fashioned black handset – circa 1975, as were still in use in many County facilities. An enormous man, tall, with a thick middle, whose dark
hair appeared to have been badly cut some seven or eight weeks ago, pushed a wire cart to the door of her office. From the upper basket of this cart he took a bundle of envelopes held together by a rubber band. He entered the office.

  “Hang on a minute, Amy,” said Mrs. Houlihan. “The moron is bringing my mail.”

  The man put the bundle in the in-box which sat on the corner of her desk and turned to leave. Mrs. Houlihan reached forward with her left hand and tilted the bundle so that she could read the top envelope. Not interested, she let it fall back into the in-box.

  “Oh, he can’t hear,” she said into the handset.

  After fumbling in the cart for a moment, the man came back in the office with a bundle of three books, likewise held together with a rubber band.

  “Watch this,” said Mrs. Houlihan into the telephone. “Hey Chauncey, I just got rid of my boyfriend. Are you free tonight?”

  The man said nothing, put the books in the in-box, and turned to leave.

  “Chauncey!” she said to his back, but he gave no sign that he heard.

  “See,” she said into the telephone. “No reaction. The guy can’t hear, and he’s got a vacancy upstairs.”

  “Yeah, sometimes I am,” she said into the telephone. “But to tell you the brutal truth, I don’t even feel bad about it. He doesn’t know.”

  She ended her call with Amy and busied herself with reviewing some reports. It was about eleven o’clock when she had a visitor – a stranger, a mere member of the public. It was quite unusual for a member of the public to come to visit the County Library Department. The man stuck his arm in her office to rap on the open door, then walked in without waiting to be bidden.