“Sherleen,” Charlie said, “how do you spell your name?”
“C-H-A-R-L-E-N-E.”
“Thank you. I thought so. Tell me something, Sherleen, I am not a familiar with hair styling and cutting. Why does this salon, and all of the others I’ve visited—”
“Couldn’t have been many of them,” Lee cut in.
“Tut. Why do they smell different from barbershops? I would think hair is hair, male, female, or unisex.”
“It’s probably the stuff we use for giving perms,” Sherleen said. “Hold still.”
“Speaking of back rooms,” Ike said. “Is that one near the alley still mostly empty?”
“You mean the one where I aim to put Margie Tice when she sets up as a massage therapist?”
“That’s the one. She hasn’t started, has she?”
“Nope. You need it?”
“I do.” Ike explained his difficulties with the mayor and the fact he wanted a place to sort through all the data he was in the process of assembling. That Charlie would be helping him and he needed space and privacy.
“You just help yourself, Darling. Margie ain’t likely to need it anytime soon. I’ll give you a key to the back door and you all can come and go as you please and nobody the wiser.”
“Ike,” Charlie said, “Aside from these delightful haircuts, am I to understand acquiring the room was the purpose of this visit?”
“More or less. Of course there is the joke of the week. We can’t forget that.”
“Of course not, but Mrs. Henry does not need to lend us a room. Only a heavy amperage electrical hookup, space on the roof for a satellite dish, and a parking space nearby. I believe there is an alley behind this place and space to locate a van?”
“There is. And you’re welcome to that too. I don’t know about the electrical stuff but we can get us an electrician in here and fix that up too.”
“Thank you. Ike, we will borrow a company surveillance van. They are, or can easily be configured with all the computer stuff we need, including an operator. Now, I need to hear the, you said, joke of the week?”
“He did. Okay, did you hear about the two nuns what were chased?”
“This isn’t the one with the Chinese chicken?” Charlie asked.
“Chinese chicken? No, this one is…what? No. See, there’s these two nuns, Fiona and Colleen, and—”
“Irish nuns?”
“Is there any other kind? So they’re walking home to the convent place where they live at and they hear these footsteps behind them. When they hurry, the steps get to going faster too, so they figure they’re being, you know, stalked. ‘Sure and begorrah,’ Colleen says—”
“Ms. Henry, no self-respecting Irishman says ‘sure and begorrah’ anymore, and certainly not a pair of respectable nuns.”
“Ike, does your friend always interrupt someone who’s talking to correct them like that?”
“He does.”
“Too bad. Mister Garland, unless you’re ready for Sherleen there to give you a high and tight buzz cut, you put a sock in it ’til I’m done telling this story.”
“Sorry, continue, you were at ‘sure and begorrah.’”
“She says that, and then ‘We’re being followed?’ And Fiona says, ‘Worse. I do believe that man wants to…’ you know, so—”
“Excuse me again for interrupting, but what do we know? You will need to be specific, I think, Ms. Henry, Ike is not too quick.”
“Get out the shears, Sherleen. This man needs disciplining. Rape, mister Washington, DC big shot. You happy? So, to continue, them nuns start running, but the man, he runs faster. Now they’re sure he’s going to catch them so Fiona says, ‘We should split up. That way he’ll only get to one of us.’ So they do. Colleen, she skips off to the right, Fiona, to the left. Pretty soon Colleen is back at the nun house safe and sound. Five minutes later, in comes Fiona. ‘What happened?’ Colleen says. She’s all aflutter. ‘Well,’ says Fiona, ‘he caught up with me out by the riverbank.’ ‘Oh dear, what did you do?’ Like I said, old Colleen is pretty excited, see. ‘What could I do? I lifted my skirt.’ ‘Oh my, what then?’ ‘Well, naturally he dropped his pants around his ankles.’ ‘Oh mercy, then what?’ ‘Not a problem, Colleen. Everybody knows a nun can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down. So here I am.’ It’s a dilly, ain’t it?”
“A dilly, indeed. You’re not really going to use those shears are you, Sherleen? I haven’t had a cut like that since my days as a youthful Marine at Quantico.”
“Not this time, but you be careful. Interrupting Lee in the middle of a story is considered a capital offense in this town.”
Ike’s phone rang as Lee finished blow-drying his hair.
“Where you at, Ike?” Essie.
“Down the street. What’s up?”
“Amos Wickwire is still here. He’s camped out at the spare desk and wants to know when you’re coming back. He needs the password.”
“Has he a letter authorizing the search from the mayor or two members of the town council?”
“No.”
“Then tell him he doesn’t get the password.”
Essie passed on the message. “He isn’t too happy, Ike. He says he has verbal authority direct from the mayor himself.”
“Not good enough. Tell him to go directly to His Honor and ask for it in writing. Tell him I’m thinking of running for mayor myself next election, on a reform ticket. If I win, I’ll give him the password.”
After a pause, Essie came back on the line. “Wow, I told him what you said and his face got all red and he stormed out. I didn’t know old Amos had it in him.”
“Life is filled with small surprises.”
Chapter Fifteen
Agnes Ewalt phoned Ike early the next morning. She said she had to rush as her alarm clock had failed to go off, or perhaps she forgot to pull out that little button. She wasn’t sure. It had never happened before. She sounded breathless and harried. Ike turned the bacon in the frying pan over with a fork and thanked his parents for not raising him kosher. He shifted the phone to his other ear and shoulder while he loaded bread into his toaster. He heard Charlie in the other room talking on his phone to someone else.
“I understand, Agnes. So, what was it you wanted to tell me?”
“I forgot to mention the other papers in the folder.”
“What other papers would that be?” Ike had forgotten the three or four sheets he assumed Agnes had mistakenly placed in with her questionable e-mails.
“I included some things about Doctor Fiske with those e-mails. I shouldn’t have. You have enough on your plate and don’t need to take on my problem.”
“What problem? I’d be happy to help you, Agnes. What is it about Doctor Fiske that concerns you?”
“It’s probably nothing but, well I noticed some tiny discrepancies in his résumés and I was worried, that’s all. He is the Vice President, I mean Acting President, after all, and I didn’t want Doctor Harris…Ruth, to discover too late that he might not be who he says he is and cause a scandal.”
“What are you saying, Agnes?” Ike stirred the scrambled eggs in a second pan. He never cooked his eggs in bacon grease, his only nod in the direction of nutritional discipline. He retrieved the toast and signaled Charlie into a chair. He mouthed “Agnes” in response to Charlie’s raised eyebrows.
“I think he’s padding his résumé, Sheriff. What do they call it? Kiting? He gave me one to retype a while back, and one or two of the revisions he wanted added I thought were pretty big—some publications dating back a ways, actually. I wondered if he really did all those things, and if so, why did he decide to include them on the résumé just now? I talked to Sheila, you know, the one I told you about that came here with him from Carter-Union, and she said he was onl
y updating. She said she thought everyone did. She wears really short skirts and chews gum when she talks. Snaps it like she’s punctuating her sentences. Mercy, the way she goes on about him. She is a widow, you know.”
“Really?”
“I think he was in Iraq or something, a car accident, and I heard…” Agnes must have sensed Ike’s impatience. “I’m sorry, I’m babbling…cafeteria scuttlebutt. Gossip, really. I don’t know why I listen to it. Well, so I couldn’t very well ask Doctor Fiske myself, could I? I didn’t want to start an in-house inquiry in case I was wrong. People would think I was just petty or think Ruth ordered it. I guess you can see my dilemma. I added those papers because I thought you could find out for me what, if anything, on his CV is true.”
“CV? Oh, curriculum vitae. I can try, but you understand, I’m kind of tied up with the other investigation. Let me see what I can do. Is there any urgency?”
“No, no, that’s why I called. I felt so ashamed of myself for even asking you when you have so much sadness and other things to think about. I called to say you should just forget about it. Just throw those papers away. It’s just me thinking the worst about someone I don’t particularly like, I suppose.”
“I’m sure it’s not just you, Agnes. What you suspect is important and does need someone to look into it. And I will, but not right now, okay?”
“I guess so, yes. Thank you. If you go to the hospital, don’t mention it to Ruth. We don’t want to upset her. Do we?”
“Actually, we do, sort of, but not that way.”
Ike hung up and sipped the coffee Charlie had poured for him.
“What was that all about? Or is it personal.”
“It’s Agnes. You remember I told you she gave me some papers to add to the pile. She included a few copies of the Acting President’s CV. She thinks he might be falsifying items on it. She’s afraid it could come back to bite Ruth. She understands that is the least of Ruth’s worries at the moment, but if the man is a fraud, it could hurt the university, and Ruth by indirection. She wanted me to investigate.”
“I heard that part. You have enough on your mind. I have access to the kind of people who do that stuff all the time. Get me this guy’s vitals, his Social Security number would do for a start, and we’ll outsource that little project.”
“It’s not that critical, Charlie.”
“I know. That’s why we will shoot the problem off to Donnie the Snoop.”
“Who?”
“A guy I know.”
They ate breakfast in relative silence. Charlie said he marveled that Ike could cook. That it was only eggs, bacon, and toast, Ike reminded him, meant his compliment didn’t amount to much.
“I’ve arranged for the van. It will arrive sometime after three. We will need rental cars, and a motel room or two for a while. I figure you can set that bit up, Ike, as you know the area. An electrician and installer will be here around two this afternoon to put in the basic set-up.”
“That’s fast.”
“Time, Ike. The trail gets colder by the minute. We need to start tracking before it is covered with too many footprints.”
“Right. Thank you for that, Uncas.”
***
By three that afternoon a Comcast Cable van pulled into the alley located behind the strip of storefronts on Main Street and parked by the back door of Lee Henry’s hair salon. It would stay there a week. The young man who seemed to be a part of the operation said he would be installing phones and Internet to the salon. The satellite dish on the roof seemed an odd thing for a cable company to install, but technology moved at such a rapid pace these days, so who could say?
On the other hand, what a salon and barbershop needed with that sort of service did raise few eyebrows. It’s not like it’s a sports bar, they noted, but then everyone knew Lee Henry was a bit pixilated and you could expect almost anything from her. There was even talk that the banker’s wife, Mrs. Tice, would be offering massages there, but nobody believed that yet. Less explicable were the comings and goings by the sheriff and his friend from out of town, in and out of the van, into the salon by the back door, and so on. The town had, however, learned not to question their sheriff’s actions. If he needed to check out those Comcast people, it needed to be done. And, as few utilized the alley for anything more than a shortcut to the parking lot in the rear of the sandwich shop next door, it should cause fewer questions than it might have otherwise.
By nightfall, the equipment in the van was up and running, online to the most sophisticated computer programs available anywhere. The screening of Ike’s list of potential suspects could begin.
Chapter Sixteen
Robert Twelvetrees, (Colonel, USA Ret.) met Ike outside the Crossroads Diner. Colonel Bob, near to his ninetieth year—people were not sure on which side—found himself relegated to a motorized scooter if he wished to do anything more than be driven to and from places by TJ and his companion, chauffer, likable, but intellectually challenged semi-caregiver. Colonel Bob, who’d served with his hero, General George Patton, during World War II, had required his scooter be painted olive drab, with the insignia of the old Second Cavalry, where he’d first served on horse, decaled on the battery box.
“Colonel Bob, it’s good to see you. Are you here for breakfast?”
Ike held the door open for him as Colonel Bob maneuvered his scooter around various objects that normal, ambulatory persons would have hardly noticed, the undertaking made doubly difficult for him due to his advancing macular degeneration.
“Every Wednesday if I can. Flora takes care of me. I keep telling her the EEOC or whatever G-D government agency it is that wants to tell you how to live your life, will be all over her if she doesn’t make this place more handicap friendly.”
“What did she say about that?”
“She said she still had her old scatter gun and if some hotshot federal Johnny wanted trouble, well bring it on. I don’t know where she gets all that aggression, do you?”
“It’s the company she keeps, Colonel Bob. A lot of riffraff hangs out here, present company excepted, of course.”
“Of course.” Colonel Bob eased his scooter to a table with minimum damage to intervening chairs and stools and yelled for Flora to get his breakfast. Flora Blevins shouted something in return that might, in another age, have been deemed obscene. Colonel Bob smiled and waved in acknowledgment.
“Sorry to hear about your lady, Sheriff. Currently, I am a complete wreck only waiting for the hearse to come and collect me, but if there is anything a half-blind, completely gorked out old Army man can do, you let me know. If I can’t get it done, I’ll send TJ out to do it for me.”
“Many thanks. I will let you know, but right now, I am just trying to figure out where to start. I don’t know if the scuttlebutt has reached you yet, but Ruth’s wreck was not an accident and I have a lot of questions to put to people. The immediate problem is who to ask.”
“Can’t help you there. Flora, where’s my breakfast? I still have some contacts with the DOD, though most of the people I grew up with in the service are dead. Hell, they’re all dead, but still you never can tell.”
“Thanks.” Ike moved down the length of the diner and found a seat in what he thought of as his booth. Flora plunked down his coffee and stood arms akimbo, waiting. “Just you, this morning. Where’s your smart-mouthed friend?”
“If you mean Mr. Garland, he will be joining me shortly. Also, I think Deputy Sutherlin plans to join us as well.”
“Is that the smart Sutherlin or the dopey one that married Essie Falco?”
“The smart one.”
“Too bad, I like the dopey one better. He has a sense of proportion.”
“He has a what? Billy has a sense of proportion? Billy is moment to moment most days. What do you mean he has a sense of proportion?”
&nbs
p; “It means I like him `cause he don’t take life too seriously, unlike some people I know. So how’s Miss Ruth doing?”
Ike gritted his teeth. “She’s holding on.”
What a stupid answer. Ike had become weary of hearing that question. How to answer? Were the folks who asked it really concerned about Ruth, about him, both, or merely being polite? How did he relate to them the turmoil he felt, the emotional swings between guilt, anger, fear, and hope—sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous? And did they really want to know? He wondered if people would think him rude or crazy if he printed up little cards that listed possible responses to that question. He could check off one or the other and hand it to the asker.
“Well you let me know if there’s anything I can do. They feeding her good up there at that hospital? I could fix up a tray.”
“She’s fine right now, Flora, thank you. Eating isn’t her big problem.”
Charlie slouched into the diner, waved a greeting to Flora, which was studiously ignored, and sat across from him.
“What do you recommend for breakfast, Ike, and why are we here? You made a perfectly adequate meal yesterday. Now, I wake up, you have vanished and left me a note. Not very hospitable, I must say.”
“In the first place, I always eat here in the morning if I can. It is one of my listening posts. I’m not officially on duty at the moment, but you never know what I’ll pick up. Secondly, Frank is meeting me here because I refuse to go to the office. Oh, and as I indicated to you before, I don’t recommend food to Flora’s customers. If she likes you, she will select your breakfast for you. If she doesn’t, she insists you order it yourself, and then will tell you she’s out of whatever you ask for.”
“Then the strategy, assuming I am not on her dance card, is to order something I really don’t want in order to get what I do.”
“You have the proper devious mind to figure that out.”
“I’ve had lots of practice.”
Flora brought coffee and glared at Charlie. He ordered a fish sandwich with extra tartar sauce and was told the diner was out of fish. He got scrambled eggs. Frank joined them a few minutes later and sat next to Charlie.
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