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

by Laura Belgrave

  Then Drake began to cry. Not counting her Bobby, she’d been through three husbands, bypass surgery, an addiction to pain killers, and two terrifying years of actually being broke. She had three grown children. All of them avoided her. So did Bobby’s dog, a Chihuahua that trembled constantly and peed on the carpets during thunderstorms.

  Claudia thought she might lose her patience after all, but Drake made her point just in time. “I know what pain is all about, but Barbara didn’t. She’d never been crapped on in her life. She had a storybook romance and a storybook marriage and up until the day some doctor trashed it all with a single word, the only bothersome thing in her life was a touch of arthritis—and that hardly even slowed her down. But after the Alzheimer’s thing, she turned numb, and then I suppose she got panicked and I should’ve stayed with her, but I didn’t. I let that floozy waltz in and I know, I know that she wound up in Florida because of her.”

  The washing machine chugged monotonously. Claudia realized with a start that it had already completed its fill cycle and she hadn’t moved. She grabbed a rag and plucked a can of Pledge from a wire shelf above the dryer, then headed for the living room, her mind still hostage to the woman’s boozy voice.

  According to Drake, the move had been sudden. Barbara Becker casually talked about the possibility of leaving, and then one day the Beckers were simply gone.

  “You know what I got? I got a call from the damned airport! Can you believe it? She made all these apologetic noises, said something about it being too hard to say goodbye face to face, and told me she’d call as soon as they were settled and we could talk, really talk. Like that ever happened. Fact is, the only thing she apparently cared about after she left was the half-assed garden she started, which she must’ve hired someone to keep up because it’s gorgeous now, but the rest of her house, she let it all go to hell, just like her friends.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claudia murmured.

  “Yeah, well when you talk to her next, you just tell her that she’s got dandelions in her grass and the paint is peeling around the window frames. That oughta get her attention.”

  Claudia had murmured something sympathetic, then managed to extract the names and numbers of a few more of Barbara Becker’s Chicago friends before they hung up, at which point she would have been happy for a drink herself. But that could come later. She had calls to make, furniture to polish, a carpet to vacuum and two more loads of laundry to do. Plenty enough to keep herself occupied in the space that Robin and Dennis would have shared on any other Sunday night.

  * * *

  She was dreaming, something convoluted about the dentist, when the phone flogged her from sleep. At first she mistook it for the alarm, and batted at it with a hand still caught beneath the sheet. The kitten hit the floor at the same time the clock did and Claudia throttled to a sitting position. Her mind spun on possibilities, none of them good, as she grabbed the phone and creaked a hello.

  “Babs is missing.”

  Claudia tried to clear the cobwebs. “Mrs. Becker?” She groped on the floor for the alarm clock and squinted at the red numbers. Five in the morning.

  “She’s missing and so is my jewelry and car.”

  There was an edge of hysteria in the woman’s voice. Claudia snapped on the light. “Slow down, Mrs. Becker, slow down.” She cleared her voice. “Now what do you mean, ‘she’s missing’?”

  “I mean she’s missing, Detective! How hard is that to understand?”

  Claudia automatically reached for her cigarettes, remembering in the next second that they were on the kitchen counter and she was on a phone with an actual cord. “Tell me more,” she said, rising. “How do you know she’s missing?”

  “We were supposed to have dinner at eight. She had plans to go out—I’m not sure where—but we’d agreed to eat together later. I let her use the Jag, which I often did, and I really didn’t think much of it when she was late. She’s young, after all. But by nine o’clock I was getting irritated, so I went to watch some TV while I waited for her to come in. I guess I drifted off.”

  The kitten leaped back onto the bed and found the warm spot that Claudia had vacated. He began to groom himself. She watched him distractedly, listening to Mrs. Becker carry on. Her ten-thousand dollar Rolex was missing. So was a diamond necklace, her pearls and two rings. There might be more; she hadn’t looked thoroughly yet.

  Claudia rubbed sleep from her eyes. “You’re sure she took them?”

  “Well, who else?” Becker snapped. “She’s gone, along with my Jaguar. My jewelry is gone, too. Now are you coming over or not?”

  Her tone held no forgiveness. She had refused to see Kensington as a murderer, but apparently had no trouble imagining her as a thief. Claudia looked at the clock again. “How is it you discovered your jewelry missing at this hour?” she asked.

  Becker sounded exasperated. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know why . . . all right, never mind.” She sighed dramatically. “This may sound foolish, but I keep my watch on the bathroom counter. When I got up to go to bed I remembered I hadn’t taken my arthritis medication, so I went into the bathroom to get it out of the medicine cabinet. That’s when I noticed the watch was gone. Of course, I was only half awake and at first I thought that perhaps I’d put it in my jewelry box. That would’ve been unusual for me, but . . . well, old people sometimes do unusual things when they’re distracted.”

  “I understand.”

  “That’s when I realized that other pieces of my jewelry were missing as well.”

  “I’m surprised they weren’t locked in a safe.”

  “Locked in a—Detective, this is my home! It never occurred to me that I needed to think like a thief myself in order to protect my property! Now are you coming over?”

  Claudia looked at the kitten and the warm bed. A fragment of the dream flickered in and out of her consciousness. “Give me twenty minutes,” she said. “I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  To her astonishment, the crime scene techs got to the Becker estate ten minutes after Claudia called them en route from her house. She filled them in, then escorted them to the bedroom and adjoining bathroom. She told them what she was looking for and where to dust for prints, but the exercise was more for Barbara Becker’s benefit than anything else. Kensington had lived in the house, was staying there still. Finding evidence of her in any of the rooms would prove nothing, unless luck blew their way and she’d been foolish enough to leave prints right in the jewelry box itself.

  Barbara Becker appeared rumpled, but she presented a calmer demeanor than she had shown on the phone. She rested her cane against the kitchen counter and busied herself making coffee while Claudia called in an APB on the Jaguar. No Jag. No jewelry. No Babs. Probably no Aaron Rivens either.

  Surprise, surprise.

  “Detective Hershey,” Mrs. Becker said tentatively, turning from the sink, “I don’t want to think what I believe you’re thinking right now.” She hobbled to the table and set down a cup of coffee for Claudia, then clutched her robe tighter around her, as if a sudden chill had pierced the air. “Stealing is one thing, but . . . I can’t even say it.”

  Claudia blew into the cup. “Go ahead, Mrs. Becker. You think that Ms. Kensington might’ve have been involved in your husband’s murder. You think that maybe she isn’t quite the woman she presented herself to be.”

  Mrs. Becker nodded. She poured herself some coffee, then joined Claudia at the table, groaning slightly as she sat. “Please forgive me for waking you. I suppose I should’ve just called 911, but you’d written your home number on your business card and—”

  Claudia waved away her concern. “Doesn’t matter. Dispatch only would’ve called me anyway.” She didn’t give voice to her real thought, which was that it would be a cold day in hell before she passed out her home number again. To anyone. “I don’t suppose you have any idea where Ms. Kensington might’ve gone?”

  Mrs. Becker shook her head. “No. I tried not to interfere with her pr
ivacy. Her voice quavered. “Obviously, that was a mistake. Maybe everything I did with her was a mistake.”

  “There’s more, isn’t there.”

  “Well . . . yes.” She took a sip of coffee. “I didn’t tell you this earlier because I was afraid of how it would sound, but now, it may be more important than I thought.”

  “Go on.”

  “About a month after Babs moved in with Henry and me, she asked for more money. Frankly, I thought she was being paid quite handsomely already, but she was looking into the future in a way that I wasn’t. She told me that perhaps she’d been rash in making such a dramatic move, especially to a small town, and said she was worried about how she’d be left once Henry died. She’d forfeited a steady job, she’d given up her friends, she’d moved from a lively city to a place that held no prospects.”

  Claudia knew what was coming. She nodded for Mrs. Becker to continue.

  “I think I’ve told you how much Henry adored her. I did, too. Well, Babs had a way of being persuasive, and because I felt panicky at the thought of being without her help all over again, I said that perhaps we could work something out. She suggested that she be included in his will.”

  “That didn’t seem calculated to you?”

  “Not at the time, no. In fact, I thought her proposal reflected a shrewd business sense that these days seems very uncommon in a young person. Part of me admired her, not only for that, but ironically because she wasn’t insisting on money up front. I saw this as an investment in each other’s future. When Henry passed on, she would have enough money to comfortably go her own way. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t have to worry about her abandoning us midstream.”

  “How much money?”

  “One hundred thousand dollars.”

  “That was the figure you gave her?”

  “Actually, no. I suggested sixty thousand, imagining that to be adequate for a new start. She said that one hundred thousand would be more appropriate. I didn’t argue very strenuously. Truthfully, one hundred thousand dollars to me or Henry wasn’t much.”

  “And your husband was okay with this?”

  “Of course. I mean, I’m not sure he entirely grasped what our agreement was all about—it wasn’t always easy to know what he really understood or didn’t by then—but he went along. He and I stopped at a lawyer’s office just outside of town and had a codicil drawn up. It took no time at all. I never gave it another thought, not even when you told me Henry had been murdered.”

  “Now you do.”

  Mrs. Becker’s shoulders slumped. “My jewelry and car are missing, and so is Babs. I trusted her with everything, and I’d told her all that you’d told me. She had to know she would have come under scrutiny. She would know she had to leave, and apparently she wasn’t going to leave entirely empty handed.” Mrs. Becker shuddered. “What happens now?”

  Claudia swallowed the rest of her coffee and stood. “We find Ms. Kensington. That’s what we do.”

  Chapter 23

  If Ron Peters was Claudia’s type, which he was not, and if he weren’t married, which he was, she would have leaped from her chair and knocked him over in an embrace certain to leave him with carpet burn. As is, she stood so quickly she had to steady the table before her platter of French toast slid to the floor.

  “Sarge! You’re back early, and thank God, because you have no idea how—what’s with the cast?” A sling supported his left arm at a ninety degree angle. “Vacations are supposed to be good for you.”

  Peters flexed the hand protruding from his cast. “And mine was, up until the time we stopped the van for a surprise visit with my wife’s brother. He was painting his house. I made the mistake of offering to help on the second story. The sun was out. The beer was cold. Unfortunately, the ladder had a bad rung, which I suspected on my way up and knew for sure in the split second it took me to go down.”

  Claudia winced.

  “Yeah, but it could’ve been worse. It might’ve been my leg.” Peters pulled out a chair when Claudia moved to reclaim her seat. “The chief told me where to find you.” He looked around. “I’ve never understood how you can see in here. It’s dark as a cave.”

  The bowling alley didn’t open to customers for another hour, but the owner welcomed cops and firefighters in early while he prepped the lanes. Claudia had anchored herself to a cocktail table in the bar, a dimly lit room with two pool tables and a dartboard. She could think without distraction here and if she was lucky, as she was this morning, the short order cook had already fired up the grill.

  “I can’t believe you cut your vacation short,” Claudia said. “I’m thrilled that you did—for one thing I’m lousy at doing roll call—but still . . . .”

  “Well, the thing is, we got back late last night and I couldn’t see wasting my leftover days hanging out at home. So I came in. When the chief saw me he went nuts. He smiled so wide you’d think he had a dinner plate jammed in his jaw. If my arm wasn’t in a cast I swear he would’ve pulled me into a bear hug. I never saw him like that.”

  Claudia told him about Suggs’s ulcer. “Getting it under control seems to have made a huge difference in his outlook.”

  “Oh. So you mean he’s becoming a human being?”

  They both smiled.

  “You know, I wondered about an ulcer.” Peters looked at her plate. “Go ahead and eat.”

  He cracked his knuckles lightly, a pure Peters reflex that drove Claudia wild. But having him back—early no less—she could live with it. She pushed some French toast on her fork.

  “Yeah, he was colorful, all right,” Peters continued. “When I asked him what I’d missed he grabbed his neck and played like he was choking, then told me you’d give me chapter and verse.”

  “So you don’t know anything?”

  “I heard that Mitch shaved his mustache off last week and I saw that we got new computers. I also met Booey and I just now learned that the chief has an ulcer. That’s what I know.”

  Claudia paused with her fork at her lips. Mitch had shaved off his mustache? A week and she hadn’t noticed?

  “So is this going to be a long story?” Peters asked.

  “Long enough for you to have some coffee. I recommend a large.”

  He groaned good-naturedly. Everything about him was good-natured. Claudia watched him head for the snack counter and polished off her breakfast while she waited for his return. Mitch had shaved off his mustache?

  They got down to business a few minutes later. Peters sipped steadily at his coffee while Claudia laid out the Farr and Becker cases in chronological order. Now and then he popped his knuckles, but otherwise did not interrupt. By the time she finished bowlers had begun to cluster around a rack of house balls. Claudia ignored them. The overhead lights in the bar would remain off until it opened at eleven for the early beer crowd.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry I missed the action,” Peters finally said. He lifted his cup, then set it down, seemingly surprised to discover it empty. “Two old people dead, both drowned, both murdered. One a man, on the right side of the tracks. The other a woman—definitely on the wrong side.” He worried at a cuticle on his good hand. “No wonder the chief’s ulcer picked now to blow up on him. I’m surprised you don’t have one.”

  “I’m probably working on it,” said Claudia. She looked at her own cup, annoyed to find it empty, grateful that it was. “When it was just Wanda Farr and Raynor looked good for it, things made sense. With him out of the picture, I don’t know.”

  “But he could be lying about the pocket, couldn’t he? He could’ve made the whole thing up, just to take the heat off himself.”

  “I wish,” said Claudia. “It would be convenient as hell.” She thought about the piece of denim material Raynor had triumphantly handed her the night of the cockfight. She thought about his expression when he told her where he got it—how he got it. “I wished he was lying so bad that I talked myself into believing it, then I talked myself right out of it. What he said, in his own way, it had the
feel of truth.”

  He claimed that when he’d gone back to Farr’s trailer for the second time, someone was already there, someone low to the ground and deep in the shadows beside the trailer door. He didn’t see the person, not at first, but his dog did and it alerted him with the same gurgling sound that Claudia herself had heard and would never forget. Raynor looked into the shadows at the same time the person looked back. A man, he thought. A man with what looked like a gun pointed at him. Hard to know in the dark, but foolish to risk being wrong.

  “If I hadn’t of been so distracted I would’ve known something was up,” Raynor said. “Usually there’s a bunch of those diseased cats hanging around the outside of Farr’s trailer. They would’ve skittered under the trailer once they spotted me and the dog, of course, but it was night and I should’ve still seen a flash of those glow-in-the-dark eyes they have. They’re not as damned clever as everybody seems to think they are.”

  For Raynor, it was obviously familiar territory. Claudia wondered how many times he’d taunted his old neighbor at night.

  “Anyway,” Raynor continued, “when I saw that gun aimed at my head I dropped flat as a manhole cover and told the dog to go get him. He tried, too.”

  That’s when Raynor had dangled the pocket. “The guy was quick, but not so fast that my dog didn’t get his teeth sunk into his ass end. I just wish he’d of taken a chunk of flesh too.”

  If Raynor’s story could be believed, and Claudia reluctantly leaned in that direction, then she wished the dog had drawn blood as well. There was just the pocket though, nipped cleanly from the intruder’s faded blue jeans as if by a seam ripper.