by John J. Lamb
Meredith studied her hands. “It was two weeks ago and I didn’t think it was connected. I just kept hoping that he’d gone to Charles Town again.”
Remembering Meredith’s initial comments at the front door, I said, “That’s over in West Virginia, right? I take it Robert had a gambling problem.”
Ewell gave Meredith a smoldering glare. “He thought he had a talent for picking horses. He bounced a check at the off-track racing facility. I took care of it.”
“Did he have any other vices?”
“What a pleasantly old-fashioned expression. I didn’t think there were any vices in the world today—just lifestyle choices.”
“Drugs?”
“Definitely no,” said Ewell and Meredith shot a quick glance at the ceiling.
“Alcohol?”
“The occasional beer.”
“Tobacco?”
“I’ve never allowed smoking in this house.” Miss Ewell handed her glass to Meredith. “Inspector, as you said a few minutes ago, you aren’t stupid, so I won’t play word games. I’d like to make you an offer.”
“What sort of offer?”
“Whether or not you can prove Trent killed my nephew, I’m going to sue the Sheriff’s Department for their conspiracy to cover up the murder of my nephew.”
“And your damages are?”
“The grave emotional distress caused by Robert’s death and their unlawful actions.” Ewell said piously and we both struggled not to chuckle.
“Yeah, I can see you’re devastated. And, of course, you’ll ask for punitive damages too. What are you thinking, an initial demand for fifteen million with the expectation the county will settle out of court for something in the high six-figure range? Say nine-hundred grand?”
“As I said, you aren’t stupid at all.”
“So, your offer to me is?”
“How would you like to be my private investigator?”
“And that would entail?”
“Continuing your inquiries and solidifying an iron-clad civil case against Sheriff Holcombe.”
“And what about recovering the Mourning Bear?”
“If in doing so it further implicates Holcombe, but my focus isn’t on getting the bear back. That’s why I have insurance. So, are you interested?”
“Not really and, even if I were, there’s the issue of me lacking a state PI license.”
“That’s a paperwork problem and easily resolved. I’m offering an initial non-refundable retainer fee of five thousand dollars, and once that’s used up, I’ll pay you four hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.”
“Still not interested.”
“Why not? That’s a lot of money.”
“Not enough to sell my soul to you.”
“What if I included a finder’s fee? You and your wife like teddy bears. I’ll give you the Mourning Bear if you find it.”
“Again, not interested. That teddy bear’s value rests solely on the fact that it commemorates the deaths of over fifteen hundred people and that’s a notion so ghoulish that I wouldn’t have it in my home if you paid me.” I put the Scotch glass on the coffee table. “Besides, you don’t need to buy me off. I don’t expect you to understand this concept, but when the time comes for your lawsuit, I’ll testify honestly—even though the thought of you stinging the innocent taxpayers of Massanutten County for a large chunk of blood money frankly sickens me.”
Ewell wasn’t even slightly upset. In fact, she seemed quietly pleased that she’d gotten what she wanted without an additional outlay of money. She said, “Then I believe we’re finished here. Meredith, please take the inspector to the guest cottage and allow him to look around. I’m going to go upstairs.”
“And call your lawyer,” I said.
“Of course.”
Chapter 17
Meredith and I stood in the hallway and watched as Miss Ewell rode the wheelchair lift to the second floor. Once the old woman vanished upstairs, Meredith led me down the corridor toward the rear of the house. We paused at the doorway leading into what I assumed was the library. There were shelves packed with leather-bound books, a large globe that was probably so old it showed places such as French Indo-China and the Belgian Congo, and a dark wooden desk the size of one of the stone support plinths at Stonehenge.
Meredith said, “Hang on a second and I’ll get the key.”
She went to the desk, opened the top drawer, and took out the key. We resumed our journey, passing the dining room and a closed door to our right that Meredith told me led to the kitchen. After that, we came to the exercise room. It was the only place in the house that didn’t look as if the Spanish Inquisition had designed the lighting fixtures and I paused in the doorway.
I was impressed. The room was equipped with everything you’d possibly need for a fitness program. There was a treadmill, a name-brand elliptical cross-trainer, a top-quality weight machine, a recumbent stationary bicycle, two weight-lifting benches, elastic workout bands, a large inflatable ball, and a wooden rack containing dumbbells ranging in weight from five to thirty-five pounds. Attached to the wall, just below the ceiling, was an enormous plasma television. For the first time I was slightly envious of Ewell.
“This is very nice. Did you pick out the equipment?” I asked.
“Thanks. Yes, Miss Ewell basically gave me a blank check.”
“Do you like working for her?”
Her voice lowered. “She isn’t the nicest person I’ve ever met, but she pays well. I was lucky to get this position.” There was a long pause and then she continued, “I don’t mean to pry, but what happened to your leg?”
“I don’t mind talking about it. A murder suspect shot me in the leg back in April of last year. The doctors did what they could to repair the damage, but there was just too much bone destroyed.”
“Did you shoot him back?”
“No. I was too busy bleeding on the pavement. My partner got him though.” I saw her wince and added, “Sorry.”
“That’s all right. Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Sometimes I’ve thought about becoming a police officer. I’ve got all the physical tools, but I don’t know if I could shoot anyone.”
“Most cops never fire a shot in their career.”
“Was that the case with you?”
“No. About twenty years ago, I ran into a guy that wanted to commit ‘suicide by cop.’ He wanted to die and didn’t have the courage to do the job himself, so he grabbed a butcher knife and went looking for a blue-suit. He found me and got his wish.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Pretty bad. For awhile I considered leaving the job altogether.”
“So, how do you ever forget something that awful?”
“You don’t. You learn to live with it.”
“Ready to go outside?”
“Yeah, let’s go see the cottage.”
She opened the backdoor and I slowly followed her down the steps. There was a cement-paved courtyard behind the house. On the right was a detached three-car garage that looked as if it had once been the carriage house. To the left was the guesthouse. It was an ivy-covered Tudor Revival cottage constructed from half-timbering set against beige plaster. The narrow arched windows were decorated with inset iron latticework in a repeating diamond pattern, the roof was a brown mosaic of wooden shingles, and the chimney was composed of red brick in an intricate hounds-tooth pattern. It wasn’t even a contest—the guesthouse was easily the most attractive building on the estate.
As we walked, I said, “I couldn’t help but observe your skeptical reaction when Miss Ewell told me that Robert didn’t use drugs.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“Don’t worry, she didn’t notice. However, when I search his room is there any chance I’m going to accidentally stick myself on a syringe?”
Meredith was flabbergasted. “You’re kidding.”
“I’ve seen it happen.”
“No, he didn’t use anyt
hing like that. He smoked marijuana.”
“Forgive me for asking, but . . . how do you know that?”
“Sometimes he’d just reek of it.”
“And Miss Ewell never noticed?”
“Of course she noticed. She lied to you about that.” A tall wall of shrubbery bordered the tiny half-circle of brick steps that served as a front porch. While she unlocked the door, I asked, “Did he own any weapons?”
“Like a gun?”
“Guns or knives.”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Did you like him?”
“Not particularly. He was a con artist.”
She pushed the door open and I went inside. When she didn’t follow, I looked back and said, “Aren’t you coming in?”
“I wouldn’t really feel comfortable.”
“I know this can be kind of creepy—going into a dead person’s room. But it would be a big help to me, just in case I find something and later we need a witness to testify to what happened.”
“If you think I should, all right.”
I turned on the light as Meredith came inside. The guesthouse was composed of a bedroom, connecting kitchenette, and a bathroom. Although the queen-size and quilt-covered bed was unmade, the quarters were clean, nicely decorated in warm pastel colors, and the air smelled pleasantly of lemon from an unlit scented candle on the dresser. If this was Thayer’s room, I’d just wandered into a bizarre alternate reality. Early in my police career, I learned an almost immutable law of the universe: Male crooks live in places that are invariably filthy and that possess a miasmic atmosphere of dirty clothing, decaying food, tobacco and marijuana smoke, and other stuff that smells so bloody awful you really don’t want to know the cause. And in such a place you’ll find piles of pornographic magazines, drug paraphernalia, and possibly even Jimmy Hoffa’s body—but definitely not a quilted bedspread and a lemon-scented candle.
I stood there gaping. “This was his room? Has anyone tidied up in here since he left?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because this doesn’t look like any burglar’s place I’ve ever seen. It’s way too sanitary and—look, oh my God—clean curtains! My old partner back in San Francisco wouldn’t believe this. Does Miss Ewell have a domestic staff?”
“Yes, a cook and a woman that comes to clean three times a week, but I don’t think she was here yesterday.”
“Well, is this the way it normally looks?”
“I really don’t know.” Meredith’s voice was chilly.
“Hey, I apologize if you took that wrong. I didn’t mean anything by it. I just assumed that at some point you might have seen inside the guesthouse.”
“And I’m sorry for overreacting, but I really didn’t like him. And if I didn’t know what the inside of his place looked like, it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part.”
“Really?”
“It’s true. I wasn’t interested, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, which just showed how vain he was. Do you want to know what he thought?”
“What’s that?”
“That he looked like Vin Diesel.” Meredith snorted with bitter humor.
“Did Miss Ewell know about the situation?”
“No, and how could I go to her and accuse Robert of all but stalking me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It didn’t look to me as if she had too many illusions about Robert.”
“Maybe you’re right. But I guess it’s a moot point now.”
“And as long as we’re talking about their relationship, do you have any idea of how Robert viewed his aunt?”
“He never said anything directly to me, but I always got the impression he didn’t really like her, but put on this big act of being affectionate because he didn’t want to be written out of her will.”
“It sounds as if everything about him was a con.”
“From what I could see, yeah.” She shifted her weight onto one leg and sighed impatiently. “So, what exactly are you looking for in here?”
“I don’t know yet. This should only take a couple of minutes.”
I began with the nightstand and opened the top drawer. There wasn’t much inside: a tube of cherry-flavored Chap Stick, a small baggie of inferior-grade marijuana, a package of rolling papers, a couple of matchbooks, and a box of condoms. The last item meant that, regardless of Miss Ewell’s belief that Robert didn’t have a girlfriend, he’d had some female company here in the room. There was another small bit of evidence to support that belief because there were three or four long brown hairs on one of the bed pillows.
Those definitely hadn’t come from Thayer and I couldn’t help but notice that Meredith’s dark brunette hair was about the same color and length as those on the bed—not that that necessarily meant anything. No doubt, there were thousands of brunettes in the Shenandoah Valley. Yet, I also realized that it was Meredith who’d spontaneously raised the topic of her rebuffing Thayer’s romantic advances. I didn’t know quite what to make of it, but even if the hairs belonged to her, what difference did it make? The most it likely meant was that she’d had a sexual relationship with a lowlife and wasn’t eager to advertise the fact.
The bottom drawer revealed a little bit more of the real Thayer. There was a key ring with all sorts of shaved and filed-down keys—ideal for stealing cars—and a baggie containing tiny broken pieces of ceramic from automobile spark plugs. Although they looked innocent enough, the chips were also burglary tools because, when thrown, they could break a car’s passenger window. These items rested atop Thayer’s respectably large collection of well-thumbed smut magazines. The discovery of the burg tools and the hardcore porn restored my faith in reality.
“Why do men look at that stuff?” Meredith asked scornfully.
“For the same reason bodice-ripping romance novels are so popular among women. I think it comes down to how both sexes have been culturally conditioned for thousands of years.”
“Humph.”
“But I suspect you believe the reason is because men are pigs . . . and in all fairness, it was my experience as a cop that the guys with big porn collections were pigs.”
Next, I made a quick search of the cedar dresser and we were back in a strange realm. There weren’t a lot of clothes, but they were clean, neatly folded, and sorted into drawers by items of apparel. Perhaps that doesn’t sound peculiar to you, but that’s only because you haven’t had my wealth of experience in looking inside men’s dressers. As a general rule, guys, including myself, don’t invest a lot of worry over maintaining our clothing in assigned drawers. Indeed our attitude can be summed up in a Johnny Cochran-esque rhyme: If it can fit in the drawer, then I’m out the door. Therefore, the presence of order, attention to detail, and aesthetic arrangement of folded clothing told me that the odds were very high a woman had put the stuff in the drawers—a woman that was something more than a casual girlfriend or just a one-time sex partner.
After peeking into the fireplace to make sure there was no evidence of anything having been recently burned, I limped into the bathroom. The medicine cabinet contained a small assortment of men’s cosmetics, and the shower contained nothing but a tiny fragment of bar soap and a serpentine arrangement of soap-scum-coated brown hairs on the drain cover. The only remarkable element was that the towels were clean.
After that, I checked the kitchenette. Opening the refrigerator, I caught another glimpse of the genuine Thayer. There was a grease-stained cardboard pizza box tipped sideways so it would fit, a couple of cans of beer, and a package of lunchmeat colored the same shade of verdigris as the tarnished copper roof of the Rockingham County courthouse over in Harrisonburg. There were only a few dishes and glasses in the cupboard, and the contents of the pantry consisted of a bag of potato chips and a box of Count Chocula cereal.
“Well, I guess that’s about it,” I said.
“It doesn’t look as if you found anything.”
“Nope.”
“What do you want me to do with the ma
rijuana and the other . . . stuff?” Meredith was already heading for the door.
“Nothing. Leave it exactly where it is for now. Hopefully, we’ll get the State Police involved soon and they’ll probably send over a photographer to take pictures of everything.”
I followed her outside and she locked the door. We stood for a moment in the bright afternoon sunshine and I savored the fresh air, the sound of the trees rustling in the gentle breeze, and an almost iridescent blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. It was a tranquil moment in a long and frantic day, and I was enjoying it right up until the moment a volley of gunfire erupted from over the ridge and just to the north. I flinched and turned, then saw a thin wispy cloud of white smoke rise from behind the hill and begin dissipating as it drifted westward on the wind.
“What the hell was that?”
Meredith glared at the hillside. “It’s those idiot reenactors over at Bill Pouncey’s farm. They’re out there almost every weekend playing soldiers like a bunch of kids. Sometimes I think they camp as close as they can to the property line just to bother Miss Ewell.”
“Considering how popular she is with her neighbors, you may be right.”
My tone was jocular, but that was intended to conceal my sudden and stomach-flipping realization that I might be wrong about almost everything. Remembering the conversation I’d overheard yesterday morning near the church, I realized that I had to get over to Pouncey’s farm and talk to the reenactors before they broke camp and there wasn’t a moment to waste. Yet there was also a chance to resolve this mystery here and now.
I fixed her with a sad, knowing smile and said, “You know, Meredith, I’ve been completely focused on Trent Holcombe as the suspect, but it occurs to me that it’s also possible Bobby’s death had nothing whatsoever to do with the theft of the Mourning Bear. Can you think of anything else you’d like to tell me?”
Meredith looked very thoughtful and shook her head. “No, I’ve told you everything I can.”
But not everything you know, I wanted to add. Instead, I offered her my hand. “Please tell Miss Ewell good-bye for me and thank you for all your help. I’ll just go around the side of the house to get to my truck.”
