Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/10

by EQM

  “No clues, then?”

  “Not much to go on. The murder weapon was a twisted scarf. The killer apparently wore gloves. No epithelials on the scarf. No prints in the apartment. She was probably killed by a man.”

  “Or a female wrestler,” I added.

  “Don’t complicate my life.”

  When Shorty referred to Prosperity as a flyspeck town, he had inadvertently given it a promotion. The main commercial district was confined to a five-acre area at the intersection of a couple of two-lane highways, and consisted of a strip shopping center, a doctor and a dentist, an attorney, and the town hall. At least the strip had a pizza parlor.

  I ordered a garbage pie and sat at a booth facing out the picture window as I ate. It was already dusk, the end of a long day on the road. I hadn’t seen a motel in town, and I was a little hazy as to where I was going to bunk down for the night.

  The parking lot of the strip center seemed to be a gathering place for the disenchanted youth of Prosperity. They hung in clusters and stood around trying to look surly and threatening.

  I finished my dinner, dropped a tip on the table, and slipped my Saints hat on.

  I was halfway to my car when one of the kids stepped in front of me.

  “Got a smoke?” he asked. A stray lock of limp hair fell across his left eye.

  “No. I don’t smoke, and you shouldn’t either,” I said.

  “I don’t like being told what to do,” he said.

  “Imagine that.”

  “If you don’t have a cigarette, maybe you can spare a few bucks so I can buy my own.”

  Several of the kids had circled around and were now at my six. I was slowly being surrounded. I didn’t think they meant to rob me, not in a place this public. They did, however, expect to intimidate me.

  I don’t intimidate easily.

  I pulled a five from my pocket.

  The kid reached for it. I jerked it back. A mix of confusion and anger crossed his features.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “This five goes to the first guy who can tell me where a family named Costner lives in this area.”

  The kid opened his jacket and showed me a knife in his belt.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You let me have the five and I’ll let you get in your car and get lost.”

  I palmed the bill and placed it back in my pocket.

  Without saying a word, I turned toward my car.

  As I expected, I felt a hand grip my shoulder.

  “I’m talkin’ to you, man,” the kid said, with a fearlessness born of the pack mentality. He was certain that numbers made him invincible.

  He was wrong.

  With my good hand, I reached up and grabbed his wrist. Several seconds later, the kid who’d touched me sat on the ground howling over the greenstick break in his radius bone, and the kid who’d tried to help him sat next to my car trying to hold back a scarlet torrent from his broken nose. The other two seemed to vacillate between taking up the attack and running like thieves.

  We were interrupted by the whoop of a siren and flashing lights. I knew what that meant. I stepped back and raised both hands to make it clear that I was unarmed.

  “What’s going on?” a man said behind me. I turned to face the cop who had stepped out of his cruiser. He was tall and skinny, with rawhide skin and sad eyes. He had augmented his uniform with snakeskin boots.

  “I was going to my car when these punks tried to shake me down.”

  “He broke my nose, Slim!” one of the youths said.

  “And he snapped my arm like it was a twig!” the leader whined.

  “Just defending myself,” I said to the cop. “The kid with the broken arm has a knife in his belt. He threatened me with it.”

  The cop leaned down, opened the leader’s jacket, and pulled the knife from his belt. Then turned to me.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Didn’t reckon so. You come with me. I need to file a report. Rooster, you and Sonny head on home, get your folks to take you to the emergency room. You come by the station tomorrow if you want to file a complaint.”

  “A complaint!” I said.

  “That’s enough out of you, mister!” Slim said. “Come have a seat in the cruiser. I need to get some information from you.”

  Half an hour later, I sat in the Prosperity Police Station. The cop, Slim Tackett, hadn’t cuffed me, but neither did he seem interested in letting me go.

  The front door to the station opened, and another officer stepped inside. He was tall and barrel-chested and athletic. He wore a gray Stetson over close-cropped dark hair going slowly silver at the temples. His eyes were blue and penetrating.

  “This him?” he asked Tackett.

  “Name’s Gallegher, Chief. Roy Patrick Gallegher. He’s from New Orleans.”

  “New Orleans?” the chief said, as he glanced over the report. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “I can’t wait to get back,” I said.

  “You can go on,” the chief told Tackett.

  “Thanks, Chief,” Tackett said. He left without saluting.

  The chief told me to sit tight. He walked to the back of the station and returned with two cups of coffee.

  “You take sugar or cream?” he asked.

  “Beer,” I said.

  He grinned, for just a second, reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a couple of paper packets of sweetener. Then he sat behind the desk.

  “Judd Wheeler,” he said. “I’m the chief of police here in Prosperity. We aren’t accustomed to riots in the shopping-center parking lot.”

  “As I told the other officer, I had just finished dinner and was heading for my car when these kids decided to hit me up for cash.”

  “So you assaulted them.”

  “The kid with the broken arm threatened me with a knife. I tried to leave. He decided to press the issue.”

  Wheeler nodded. “Rooster Broome. You tie fifteen Bliss County Broomes together and you might get a triple-digit IQ. Between you and me, I’ve kind of hoped for some time now that someone would clean Rooster’s clock.”

  “So we’re jake?”

  “No, Mr. Gallegher. We are not ‘jake.’ I got two Prosperity kids in the ER over in Morgan, and you don’t have a scratch on you. I’m not certain how to explain that. You some kind of tough guy?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I thought Wheeler’s eyes might have widened a bit.

  “Honest, too,” I said.

  “Are you so honest that if I send to New Orleans for your arrest record they’re gonna come up empty?”

  “I’ve been arrested in New Orleans,” I said. “Several times. All the charges were dropped. If you want, you can check with Detective Farley Nuckolls in Robbery-Homicide, at the Rampart Street station in the French Quarter.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “We go back a few years. He can tell you anything you want to know.”

  Wheeler drew a few circles on his desktop with his index finger, and then took a sip of his coffee.

  “What I want to know,” he said, finally, “is what you’re doing in Prosperity.”

  “I work in a bar in the French Quarter. There was a girl who waited tables there for a while. She was murdered several days ago. I’m trying to find her family.”

  “What was this girl’s name?”

  “Katie Costner.”

  Wheeler nodded, and took another sip of his coffee.

  “Katie Costner left Prosperity about five years ago,” he said.

  “So you knew her?”

  “We crossed paths. Gave her folks no end of grief. Broke their hearts, though, when she blew town.”

  “Maybe you can help me track them down. My boss in New Orleans wants me to inform them of her death, make arrangements for the funeral.”

  “Well,” Wheeler said. “Now, that’s going to be a problem.”

  “They’ve moved away?”

  “No. They’re
still here. Will be forever, I reckon.”

  It took me a moment to catch his drift.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Katie’s father died about three years ago. Cancer. Got it working in the textile dye mill over in Mica Wells. Her mother passed about a year later. Ate herself to death after her husband died. Diabetes.”

  “Tough deal,” I said.

  “It seems to me that the person you need to talk to is Quincy Pressley. He’s the preacher at the Lutheran church over off Ebenezer Road. The Costners are buried in his churchyard.”

  I glanced at my watch.

  “It’s a little late to call on him now. Is there a motel nearby I could flop for the night?”

  “Sorry. Nearest motel is over in Morgan, about fifteen miles. Why don’t you stay here?”

  “In the jail?”

  “Sure. The beds in the cells are plenty comfortable. We serve a first-class breakfast in the morning, from over at the Piggly Wiggly in the shopping center. It’ll be nice and quiet.”

  “Am I under arrest, Chief?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let’s call it protective custody. The Broomes are a clannish bunch—you know, with a capital ‘K.’ They aren’t going to be very happy that some out-of-towner maimed one of their own, no matter how much he may have deserved it. They won’t come anywhere near the jail, though. They seem to be allergic to it. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll leave the cell door unlocked.”

  And that’s how I came to spend the night in the Prosperity jail.

  Chief Wheeler hadn’t lied. The breakfast carted in from the Piggly Wiggly was top shelf. Market-cut pepper bacon, scrambled eggs, grits, and two biscuits, which I washed down with coffee from the pot in the back of the station. It wasn’t Café du Monde, but as country breakfasts go, it hit the spot.

  Chief Wheeler had kept his word also about unlocking the cell door.

  I was just finishing my second biscuit when he walked in the front door of the station and headed straight back to the holding cells. He carried a thick sheaf of fax paper.

  “Your buddy Nuckolls gets to work early,” he said. “You failed to mention last night that you used to be a cop.”

  “I was a consultant. Nashua PD in New Hampshire. Forensic psychologist. I did their profiling.”

  “Says here you killed a suspect named Ed Hix.”

  “I don’t like to talk about that,” I said.

  “I can imagine why.”

  “Read the report, Chief. Hix killed the detective working the case, and it was down to Hix or me. I decided that it was a lot better for everyone in the long run if Hix didn’t walk out of those woods.”

  “You emptied an automatic into him. Fourteen shots.”

  “That was all the gun held. I’m not going to apologize for what I did, and I’m not going to minimize it either. Either Hix was going to die, or I was. I can’t complain about the way things worked out.”

  “It seems you’ve had a very interesting life down in New Orleans. Detective Nuckolls seems to think that you’ve killed as many as six people over the last decade.”

  “He’s entitled to his opinion.”

  Wheeler set the sheaf of faxes down on his desk.

  “Besides the fact that you seem to be some sort of walking Angel of Death, Detective Nuckolls says you’re generally dependable, probably honest, and even says you were responsible for stopping a serial murderer down there a couple of years ago.”

  “It could have gone the other way very easily.”

  “Here’s my problem, Gallegher. I keep the peace here in Prosperity. This is a quiet little town. We like it that way. I would be very appreciative if you’d complete your business here and then go home, preferably without littering the landscape with bodies I’d have to bury.”

  We talked for a while longer, as he vetted me by way of the reports he had received from New Orleans, and then he offered to drive me over to meet Reverend Pressley.

  “I have a car, over in the shopping-center lot.”

  “The roads, once you get away from the commercial district, can get a little confusing. Let me drive you out there, then I can bring you back once you have an idea of where you’re going.”

  I couldn’t argue with logic like that. He led me out to one of the cruisers and held the passenger-side door for me as I sat down.

  “Have you lived in this town long?” I asked, as he pulled out of the lot onto the Morgan Highway.

  “All my life,” he said. “My father was a farmer. His father was a farmer. All the Wheelers back to before the Revolutionary War were farmers.”

  “You’re not a farmer.”

  “Had to end sometime. I wasn’t very good at it. Guess I didn’t inherit the right genes. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to be a farmer in Prosperity in a few years.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He pointed to a subdivision off to the left of the highway. It was filled with large, boxy, redbrick houses of the style I had come to refer to as “garage-mahals.”

  “Tax refugees. They think they’re getting away from it all, but they insist on having all the comforts of big-city life. These neighborhoods are spreading like seventeen-year locusts. The population in Prosperity has doubled in the last five years. I expect it’ll double again in the next two.”

  “Tough break, suburban sprawl. And you have to keep a lid on all of it.”

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

  We drove past an opulent new high school, and over a bridge spanning a tributary called Six Mile Creek. Slowly, the McMansion developments faded away, the land seemed to become more fertile, and farms began to appear on each side of the highway.

  “This is the Prosperity I remember from when I was a kid,” Wheeler said. “I’m going to miss it. Now, to get to Quincy’s church, you turn left just past this tobacco-drying barn up here, onto the Ebenezer Church Road ...”

  A few minutes later, we pulled into the gravel parking lot of a white frame church. A plaque screwed into the siding next to the front door proclaimed that the church had stood on that spot since 1764.

  As we climbed out of the cruiser, a man stepped out the front door and waved at Wheeler. He stood in the high five-foot range, with a paunchy stomach, two and a half chins, and thinning hair. He wore glasses. He stepped down to the gravel lot and extended his hand to the chief.

  Wheeler shook with him, and then pointed in my direction.

  “This is the fellow I mentioned on the phone,” he said. “Quincy Pressley, Pat Gallegher.”

  I grasped Quincy’s hand. Despite looking out of shape, he had a surprisingly strong grip.

  “I was so sorry to hear about Katie,” Quincy said. “The Costners have been a tragic family over the last several years. If you’ll follow me ...”

  He turned and started to walk around the church. We followed him. As we rounded the corner, I saw a cemetery behind the building. It stretched for almost an acre.

  “We have people in our churchyard from pre-Revolutionary times,” Pressley boasted. “People come from five counties in every direction just to do gravestone rubbings. Katie’s parents are buried just over here.”

  He wended his way between faded gravestones and depressed patches of earth to a section filled with more recent monuments. We stopped in front of a rectangle of relatively new grass.

  “Katie’s mother,” he said, pointing to the rectangle. Above it was a flat bronze plaque set into the ground, with the word COSTNER in large raised letters.

  “There’s a space on the other side reserved for Katie. I had hoped that it would be many years before I would have to use it.”

  “So she’s going to be buried here,” I said.

  “Yes. John and Susan insisted on it. Despite the fact that Katie left them many years ago, they always believed that they would be reunited. And now, I suppose they will. How did she die?” he asked.

  “It was murder,” I said. “She was strangled.”

  “How sad. I�
��m afraid there aren’t many people here in Prosperity who will attend the funeral. So many of the young folks have gone off to the cities, or have married and moved away for new jobs.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said, as I pulled out my cell phone.

  Farley was in his office at the Rampart Station. There were no new leads in the case, but the forensic team and the M.E. had completed all their procedures.

  “The family belonged to a Lutheran church here in Prosperity,” I reported. “They had arranged for a burial site for her, before they died.”

  “Okay. Have the preacher there fax the release papers, and we’ll arrange for transport.”

  He gave me the numbers for Pressley to send the information.

  I folded the phone and placed it back in my pocket.

  “Fastest five hundred bucks I ever made,” I said.

  “What?” Pressley asked.

  “My boss hired me to find Katie’s parents. I did. I guess my job’s over.”

  “Did you know Katie?” Pressley asked.

  “A little. She waited tables in the bar where I work.”

  “Would you mind, in that case, staying on for a while?”

  I guess my face reflected the question in my head.

  “For the funeral,” he clarified. “It’s so sad when I hold a funeral and nobody attends. It would be nice to have someone here who knew the girl. I never really got to know her, personally. Someone should be here who did.”

  I know a thing or two about lonely deaths and somber, empty funerals. Next to an advertisement for an unused wedding gown, a funeral without mourners is about the saddest thing I can imagine.

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem. I’ll need to find a place to stay until they deliver the body.”

  “Why not stay with me?” Quincy said. “The church provides me with a nice little house—three bedrooms, lots of space. It’s just me there. You’d be welcome to stay.”

  I thought about it for a second.

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “I’ll take you back to your car,” Wheeler said. “And I’ll draw you a map to get back here. It’s trickier than it looks.”

  I awoke the next morning to the smell of frying sausage and cinnamon.

  I pulled on my clothes, made my bed like a good guest, and found my way to Quincy’s kitchen. He stood there in his black slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, with an apron tied around his waist.