The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  “You’re full of crap.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really. I can probably straighten it out when I get around to the paperwork.” She waved to a passing patrol officer. “Man, I hate paperwork.”

  “My dogs better not get hurt. For that, I would get a lawyer, and I’m not talking about some greenie right out of law school. Believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you.” She yawned. “Want to borrow my cell phone?” She leaned back, propping herself up with her hands. “It’s new. Has pretty good reception.”

  “Stop yanking my chain, Hershey.”

  “How about you stop yanking mine?”

  Raynor spat into the ground. “I told you I didn’t kill her.”

  “I know what you told me.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “I don’t know what the truth is. But I know when someone’s lying, Raynor. And you’re lying about something.”

  “Look, Hershey, you don’t have anything on me, or we wouldn’t be here now.”

  Claudia swept her hand in an arc, taking in the barn and the last of the departing vehicles. “I have this, Raynor. From humble beginnings do all—”

  “—things start. Yeah, yeah.” He scratched his ear. “All right. I tell you a thing or two, and then I walk, right? I get my dogs and I walk.”

  “You broke the law. I can’t make promises.”

  “But that . . . discretionary thing?”

  “Maybe. No way will you walk altogether, but maybe I could make things go . . . easier.”

  “Not good enough, Hershey.”

  Claudia sighed and stood. Carella and Suggs were wandering around by the barn. She started to call out to them.

  “All right, all right, damn it. Sit back down. Just give me a minute to think.”

  “You don’t need a minute to think. You either have something to tell me or you don’t. If you do, let’s go down to the station and get it on tape.”

  He didn’t need a minute to think, but he was doing it anyway. Claudia crushed out her cigarette, giving him space. She smiled inwardly. It was all about the dogs. His dogs! Hot damn.

  “The cuffs come off?” he finally said, looking up, but not quite meeting her eyes.

  She had him. “Sure. Once we’re there, yeah.”

  “Coffee?”

  “That and toilets.”

  Raynor grunted while he struggled to his feet. “I’m getting too old for this kind of shit.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Claudia replied. She nudged him toward a patrol car. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter 20

  The shower head was one of those fancy numbers. It boasted six modes that dispensed water in everything from a steamy tropical mist to a masochistic beat hard enough to leave marks. Claudia chose the latter setting, the one Robin called “the skin scraper,” and let hot water pummel her. Fifteen minutes later, when she finally felt purged of the day’s grime and revived enough to listen to the interview tape, she turned it off and groped for a towel. The bathroom was steamed up, but not so much that she couldn’t see herself in the mirror when she put on her glasses, and she eyed herself critically.

  “You are not my friend,” she mumbled at the mirror. She sighed, and vowed to get back into her exercise routine soon. When the Farr case was over. When the Becker case was over. When life was discovered on Pluto. She threw on a robe and headed for the living room, detouring first to the kitchen for something to drink. A glass of wine would be nice. She thought about the mirror and opted for water instead, then made her way to the living room, grabbing her briefcase and a small cassette player on the way.

  The kitten was nestled in a corner of the couch, and she eased herself onto the cushion in a way that wouldn’t disturb him. He hadn’t risen to greet her when she came in at two in the morning, but he lifted his head now, blinked at her once, gave a quick lick to a front paw, stretched half-heartedly and went back to sleep.

  Claudia touched one of his ears with a finger. It flicked twice. Out of nowhere, she felt a powerful urge to call her sister, but she had no idea how to reach her and anyway, they hadn’t been on speaking terms for years. Sydney wouldn’t even know her voice. They never . . .

  Don’t go there.

  She shook it off, opened her briefcase and pulled out the tape with Raynor’s statement. He’d quickly reverted to his usual smug manner once he was seated on a padded chair and in the station’s air-conditioned comfort. Claudia had no real desire to hear him again, but the son of a bitch had spun an interesting story. It merited a second listen and there wouldn’t be time tomorrow. She put the tape in the machine and fast-forwarded past the standard introduction that established the date and time and their identities. When Raynor’s scratchy voice came on, she stopped the cassette and hit play.

  “. . . sure this is fresh? It tastes like boot leather.”

  “If you want better coffee, Raynor, go to Denny’s. Tell me about Wanda Farr and your relationship with her.”

  “Nothing like getting right to the point.” Raynor took a swallow of the coffee and made a face. “You already know about my relationship with her. We were neighbors, but we weren’t friends. She antagonized me every chance she got. And before you ask, I antagonized her too. Nothing you don’t already know.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “I need to take a leak.”

  “Come on, Raynor. Let’s get this done.”

  He cackled, then turned serious. “I saw her on a Thursday, early afternoon.”

  “What Thursday?”

  “I don’t know, a couple weeks ago?”

  “Like maybe June 22?”

  “Could be. Probably.”

  “All right. Where did you see her?”

  “This isn’t gonna sound good. You’re likely to jump to conclusions.”

  “I’m not jumping anywhere. Just tell me where. And tell me why.”

  “Well, shit.” Raynor fidgeted and scratched at his beard. “All right. I went to her trailer. She’d been to mine earlier, hollering and making a big to-do about one of my dogs, threatening to call Animal Control on me. Again. That bitch, she—”

  “She came onto your property? Wasn’t she worried the dogs would go after her?”

  “Hell, no. You can believe this or not, but my dogs are trained to respond only to my commands. They’re made to look meaner than they are. Works, too, nine times out of ten.”

  Claudia wanted to ask why they made no noise, but it wasn’t relevant and Raynor was on a roll. She nodded, encouraging him to continue.

  “The dogs’ll go after strangers, they’ll chase them some, they’ll corner them, but they are not trained to kill. Farr learned that much by living so close to me. She knew them. They knew her.”

  “So why’d she come over?”

  “Aw, because one of my dogs killed one of her cats. Well, that’s what she said. She said one of my dogs went over to her place and mauled a cat. But that’s what she was always saying. The woman was wicked crazy.”

  “You’re saying that your dogs left people alone and her cats?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. A dog’s a dog. It can be trained in some ways, but not others. Mine would take off after birds, squirrels, raccoons and anything else on four legs. If one of her cats happened to stray too close to one of my dogs, well, it’s possible he’d go after it.”

  Claudia stopped the tape for a minute and sipped her water. She gazed at the kitten, shook her head, and hit “play” again.

  “So the day she came over, this Thursday, what happened?”

  “Nothing. She screeched at me, I yelled back, and then, like always, she went away.”

  “So what was it that brought you to her trailer later?”

  “I got a call from Animal Control. That witch must’ve actually gone out and found a pay phone and called them.”

  “And?”

  “And I told Animal Control it was just Wanda Farr making a lot of noise about nothing, as usual. Sometimes they’d
come out anyway. Sometimes they wouldn’t. This time they didn’t. They gave me the usual spiel on the phone, told me to be nice, or whatever, and that was that.” Raynor paused to drain the rest of his coffee. “I’ll take one of those cigarettes now.”

  “This is a non-smoking building,” Claudia said. But she lit one for both of them anyway. “So what happened next?”

  “I watched TV. Did some stuff. Had a couple drinks. Got pissed all over again. I mean, who the hell was this woman to call about my dogs when her stinkin’ cats roamed all over the place, wailing whenever they were in heat, fighting and screeching amongst themselves? I like things quiet. My dogs are quiet. They know how to behave. Her cats were a blight on the neighborhood. They’d—”

  “So on this particular occasion you built up a real steam about them, is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you went over there . . . to do what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know!” Raynor flicked ash on the floor before Claudia could stop him. “I didn’t have a plan. I don’t know, I guess I was going to yell back, scare her a little. I was working on my fourth drink, maybe my fifth. I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I usually do.”

  “So you went over.”

  “Yeah. I leashed a couple of my dogs and I went over. I took my dogs and my drink and I sought her out.”

  “When?”

  “Probably about dusk. She was just outside her trailer, doing whatever, and the minute she spotted me she started right back up. I wasn’t there long.”

  “So what happened?”

  Raynor examined his cigarette, avoiding Claudia’s eyes. His voice dropped an octave. “The truth? I lost my cool, totally. We were about four, five feet apart.” He grew silent for a moment and ran a grimy fingernail around the rim of his coffee cup. Then he blew a pocket of air from his mouth. “What I did was I threw my glass at her, not thinking about it, just reacting, and it . . . well, it sort of thudded off her head. For a split second nothing happened. She just looked at me. Then she stumbled back, like she was dazed or something. She put her hand on her head where the glass hit her and then she started to go down a little. She didn’t fall, though. She walked in a little crookedy line, a few steps forward, then a few steps back, but she didn’t go down.”

  “And what were you doing?”

  “Me? I . . . nothing. You got to understand, this thing happened so fast, I . . . all I did was watch her. And then, then I just . . . left. It made me nervous, the fact that she was doing these screwy little circle-like walks, and now she wasn’t saying anything either.”

  “You went back to your trailer?”

  “Yeah. I was a little panicked, maybe.”

  “What about the glass?”

  “You already know the answer to that, is my guess.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I left it there. It’s got a heavy bottom and it fell on some weeds, so it didn’t break. Amazing, isn’t it? The thing hit her head. It hit the ground. It didn’t break. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that at the time. I just wanted to leave.” He fidgeted. “Look, can I hit the can now? Seriously, I really do have to go.”

  Claudia had paused the tape recorder at that point, giving each of them a break. She stopped it now as well, and quietly rose from the couch to stretch. Raynor was like any other bully she’d ever known, and just as cowardly. Anger drove him to Farr’s trailer. Fear drove him away from it. She thought about him while she did some sloppy knee-bends and then, annoyed with herself for the half-assed effort, punished herself with a dozen serious crunches and an equal number of side leg lifts. To her surprise, she felt herself getting into it. She rolled toward the coffee table and hit the play button again, listening while she worked at working out. The sound of Raynor’s hearty voice made her skin crawl.

  “Whew! I feel like a new man,” he’d said. “I’ll tell you what, when you hit a certain age you got to take the horse out of the barn a lot more than you do when you’re young.”

  Claudia had rolled her eyes then, and she rolled them now.

  “Let’s pick up where we left off,” she said. “You left Wanda Farr walking in circles, and you went home. What next?”

  “Nothing next, leastwise not then.”

  Claudia waited.

  “Okay. Come morning, I half expected the old lady to storm my property again or set the cops on me. I was surprised she hadn’t already called them the night before, but I figured that what with it being dark and all, she just didn’t want to go hunt down a phone. So in the morning I waited, thinking about what I’d say, did a couple chores, worked my dogs some—like that.”

  Raynor’s face had taken on a troubled expression then and he wet his lips, apparently thinking how best to phrase what came next. Claudia shifted to her back and put her legs into the air, her knees at ninety degrees. She bicycled past a lengthy pause on the tape, marveling at the self-restraint she’d shown in not rushing him through his narration.

  Finally, he continued: “Well, she didn’t come and she didn’t come, and neither did anyone else. It began to gnaw on me some.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? What a stupid question.” Raynor shook his head disgustedly. “Obviously, I was starting to worry whether the glass had maybe knocked the old fool senseless.”

  The glass. Not him, of course. The glass.

  “You went back?”

  “Yeah. It was mid-afternoon or so, and I headed on back, this time without my dogs. She wasn’t outside, so I knocked on her door. I had twenty bucks in my pocket. I figured on giving that to her, sort of to make amends, you know?”

  Big whoop. “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyways, she didn’t answer the door. I must’ve stood there like a jackass for five minutes, knocking and knocking, but nothing.”

  “Did it ever occur to you to maybe call 911 or something?”

  “No, I can’t say that it did.” Raynor leaned forward, bristling. “Let’s not forget that I didn’t start this thing, she did.” He grunted, apparently satisfied with the moral choices he’d made. “Besides, the glass was gone, so I figured that she must’ve been okay because she obviously picked it up off the ground and brought it into her trailer. Probably didn’t have anything but dirty paper cups inside. This was a good glass. It would’ve been like a prize to her, well worth the headache it might’ve caused her.”

  “Okay. Let’s see if I have this straight, Mr. Raynor. You hurled a glass at Wanda Farr and hit her in the head. She staggered, but didn’t actually fall. You went back to your trailer, fretted over the prospect of the cops coming out, and when they didn’t, you fretted even more that maybe that hadn’t come because she was too dead to call them. Is that about right?”

  “Close enough.”

  “All right, good. You went back with twenty bucks to make things up to her, but she didn’t answer the door. You were all right with that, because the glass was gone, which you interpreted to mean that she’d taken it inside. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding between neighbors, but in the end everything worked out because Wanda Farr got to keep a good glass. How am I doing?”

  “You can see where it was all logical.”

  “Uh-huh. So then what happened?”

  “Again—nothing. I didn’t see her. She didn’t see me. I put the whole thing out of my mind until I heard that she was found dead in her trailer.”

  “You kind of thought she died after the fact? That maybe you really did kill her after all?”

  “Want to know the truth? I didn’t think that at all, not in the beginning. Fact is, I laughed my ass off. Here I am worrying about a little bump on the head and as it turns out the old gal drowned herself. What I felt was mighty relieved.”

  “So you didn’t make a connection between hitting her in the head and her drowning in the tub?”

  “Not until you showed up with that little monkey sidekick of yours.”

  “His name is Booe
y.”

  Raynor waved a hand. “Whatever. Point is, everybody was talking about how Farr drowned in the tub. Everybody said it was an accident. Then you were in my face with questions. I started to wonder about the bump all over again, like if maybe she had a delayed reaction and drowned accidentally because of it. It still would’ve been an accident, but I could see how you might could take it in another direction, make it into a ‘contributing circumstance’ or whatever you call it. So I began to ponder on that glass again.”

  “You wanted it back.”

  “Tried to get it, too, which you already know because you called me up trying to spook me, asking if I found what I was looking for.” Raynor shrugged. “So you got the glass and you got my prints on it. That’s why we’re here. Only thing is, I didn’t kill Farr and you know it.”

  “Persuade me. Tell me something I don’t know, Mr. Raynor.”

  Claudia sat up, a little out of breath. She looked at the tape player and listened intently to what she already had heard.

  “Here’s something you don’t know, Detective.” Raynor grinned hugely. “Here’s two somethings. First off, I know you and that Booey were out by my trailer, stirring up my dogs. You think I don’t know what goes on there? But second, I wasn’t the only one out at Farr’s trailer that night. And I got proof. It’s a prize, all right. You want it, it’s yours. Just drop the nickel-dime cockfighting charges, bring me my dogs, take me home, and I’ll give it to you.”

  * * *

  Even though the hour approached four in the morning, she thought it would take her a long time to fall asleep. She’d crawled under the covers feeling over-stimulated by the exercise and churning with the possibilities that Raynor’s ‘prize’ suggested. She scowled into her pillow. It wasn’t proof, of course. Nothing could be that easy. But what he’d given her, perhaps later it might just develop into evidence.

  Five minutes later, with the kitten at her feet, she slept.