“Do? What could we do? Parker owned the town. You cross him and your life was miserable, you know?”
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“Well, anyway,” she brightened, “them days’re all gone. You’re the sheriff now and I’ll tell you, Ike, if you’ve a mind to, you can strip search me anytime you want. I’m best in the morning, though, when I ain’t been on my feet all day. Gravity’s not kind to you when you cruise past forty. Sit down, honey, and let me see if I can make something out of that mess on your head.”
Ike sat and allowed Lee to tuck the sheet under his chin and around his neck. Lee clucked and tut-tutted as she combed, measured, and began to clip.
“Ike, I got one for you. What’s the difference between true love and herpes?”
“I can’t imagine. Tell me, what is the difference between true love and herpes?”
“Herpes is forever! Ain’t that a hoot? Georgie Tice told me that one—herpes is forever,” Lee chortled. “Had a big night last night, did you?”
“Big night? No, not really, not if you mean what I think you mean, then definitely not.”
“I say you were out with a lady last night and it got pretty up close and personal.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Oh, a woman can tell. There’s the look—and other stuff.”
“The look? What look?”
“Oh, you have a little glint in your eye.”
“Lee, I didn’t sleep last night at all.”
“There, you see, I was right. Lover, you need to learn to pace yourself. Love a little, nap a little, that is, if you’re going to pull an all-nighter.”
“Enough already. Nothing like that happened. It was just dinner. What other stuff?”
“Well, the big tip-off is this twelve-inch-long brunette hair on your collar. It’s not yours and it sure ain’t mine. Got to be someone else—another woman. I hope she was nice to you.” She dissolved into another paroxysm of laughter.
“Lee, when you’re done wetting your pants at my expense, I have a favor to ask, as one detective to another.”
“Shoot, Ike, I’m all ears.”
“Your ex-husband and your friend Roy are both truckers, spend a lot of time on the interstate, right?”
“Pretty much. They’d rather pull north-south and be close to home than go east-west so, yeah, they try to pick up loads running up and down I-81.”
“Lee, whoever pulled the robbery loaded the stuff into trailers. My guess is that they are not too far away. Ask your friends if they have seen anything, anybody that is…I don’t know…different, suspicious. That could give us a line on where the pictures are… anything at all. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I could be fooled by a bogus trucker, but a trucker couldn’t.”
“I’ll ask around. There, you’re done, lover. If you’re going to see that lady again, this ought to get her panting in a hurry.”
Ike paid and left the shop. Lee called out after him.
“And if the lady don’t take good care of you, you tell her me and the rest of the horny old bats in the county are going to scratch her eyes out.”
Ike was halfway back to town when the radio’s low static coalesced into Essie’s voice.
“Ike, you got your radio on? I called out at Lee’s and she said you just left. Ike?”
“Essie, for God’s sake, just call. I’ll answer if I’m on. You do not have to work your way through your day for me. What is it?”
“Sorry, I just can’t quite get used to all this formal stuff on the radio and all. I was telling Momma last night—”
“Essie, stop right this minute. Just give me the message.”
“Oh, right. Ike?”
“Yes, Essie, it’s me. I’m here and you’re going to tell me something, aren’t you?”
“They found Parker.”
***
Ike pulled into the parking lot beyond the bunker near the point where the overgrown lane ended in the trees. Whaite Billingsly waited for him with the coroner. The three walked down the lane, stepped over the log that blocked it, and went into the trees for about ten yards. Whaite motioned to Ike’s left, toward a small depression six or seven yards away. It was the early stage of one of the sinkholes that characterize the area’s topography.
Ike walked to the edge and looked down at the broken body of Loyal Parker. In death, he looked only pathetic. The eyes that once froze people with their malevolence and terrified the helpless were blank, covered with the curdled milk scum of death. The coroner explained to Ike it appeared Parker had been dead at least thirty-six hours. The cause of death, he guessed, a professional guess, was a tremendous blow on the back of the head that shattered the base of the occipital bone and a fair portion of the right mastoid.
“I think he was hit once, very hard, with a crowbar or tire iron, something like that, Ike. I’ll know for sure after I’ve posted him.”
“You’ll get a report to me soon, Doc?”
“Soon’s I’m done. Okay to take him out?”
“Whaite, you got everything you need here?”
“Been over it with a fine tooth. There’s nothing new here. Footprints same as over at the building, only better. No sign of the weapon, and we’ve gone over the whole area. Funny thing, though, they didn’t take his gun. You’d think that’d be too tempting to pass up.”
“These guys are professionals, Whaite, they don’t want, or need, a very traceable piece like that. Okay, Doc, you can take him out. You got anything else, Whaite?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure, Ike, but I got a bad feeling about something. You know that loop on the surveillance tape showed a car down here two nights ago. ’Course it wasn’t here yesterday, and we guessed Parker shooed it away after the TV was tampered with, but before the robbery. Now with Parker dead, I reckon it means he was killed about the same time.” Whaite scratched his head and frowned.
Ike respected Whaite’s intuitive, if not particularly articulate, method of sorting out possibilities, probabilities, and arriving at inevitabilities. He waited.
“Well, look here, Ike. I found these over there, about forty feet from where the car was parked.” Whaite held out a pair of woman’s underpants, the elastic band broken.
“And old Parker, he’s over there away from the car, and over here, here by this tree trunk, you can see where he was standing for a while. Ike, you know his reputation—he got his jollies, you know, watching. He couldn’t do anything himself. Well, he used to come here a lot, see. He shifted that surveillance camera so he could see anybody who came back here. He’d sneak down, watch a while, maybe, you know, get it off with himself, and then jump the kids, scare the hell out of them and send them away.
“So anyway, you can see where he was lying, and you can see where he fell here by the tree.”
“And?” Ike felt the knot begin to form in his stomach. He knew what Whaite would say next and wished it were not so.
“Well, Ike, I don’t know. But it seems to me like old Parker caught it here and was toted over there and chucked down the sink hole before he went to the car. His zipper’s still down, but the car is gone and we got these britches past where the car was at. They got to be the ones from the car on account of it rained here Wednesday night and these are dry. I reckon the thieves got the car and whoever was in it.”
“So we’re looking at hostages,” mused Ike.
“Or more bodies.”
“Whaite, let’s stick with more bodies. We’ll keep this local as long as we can.” At least, Ike thought, until after he talked to Charlie.
“I want you to go back to the security office up on the campus. Fill those clowns in on what’s happened and tell them they work for me now. If they give you any trouble, tell them I have deputized them. Then see if you can get a license plate number off the videot
ape, registration, description, anything, and track it down. Have Essie call the college and find out if anybody is missing, and send those pants to the lab in Roanoke. I don’t expect we’ll find anything interesting, but you never know, some DNA maybe.”
“You going to stick around here, Ike?”
“No, I’ve got another stop or two to make. You can get me on the radio or the cell phone.”
Chapter Seventeen
Ike glanced at his watch. It was still early, too soon to call Georgetown. He thought about calling Ruth, stared at his cell phone for a full minute, and decided to wait. He would drop in on her later. Things were getting complicated, and he needed some information and an outside opinion. He hesitated and then, his mind made up, drove back to town, turned north at the stoplight, and made his way past the golf course to the Meadows, the town’s only upscale residential section. He searched mailboxes until he found the one he was looking for: Tice. He turned in the driveway, parked, and went to the front door and pressed the doorbell.
“Well, if it ain’t Mr. Ike. Land sakes. Seems like a hundred years since we seen your face ’round here.”
Amy Cartland filled the doorway, large, black, and beaming. She had been an institution when Ike was growing up. No one knew how old she was, only that no one in town could remember a time when she was not around.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Cartland,” Ike said, smiling. “Is Mrs. Tice in?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Ike, she is. She expecting you?”
“No, she’s not. I just thought I’d drop by, to chat.”
“Well, she sure going to be surprised when she see you, that’s a fact. She’s out back, by the pool. You know where that’s at, Mr. Ike?”
“Oh, yeah.” Ike turned and walked around the house.
Marge Tice was lying face down, her still youthful body gleaming with suntan oil and barely covered by the pale blue bikini, its top untied at the back. Ike cleared his throat as he approached so as not to startle her. She cocked one eye open, squinted, and smiled when she recognized him.
“Hold it right there, Ike,” she said, “while I try to get myself more or less decent.” She gathered the two skimpy strings that served as straps for her bra, and in the classic maneuver that only women seem to have mastered, reached behind her back with both hands, and tied the straps together. Satisfied that they would hold, she rolled onto her back and sat up.
Marge Tice was one of those women who never seem to age. It is not that they stay perpetually young, propped up with surgery or silicone, but they just hold their looks. They are beautiful at every age, with a beauty appropriate for that age. Ike remembered when she was just Margie Davis, the most popular girl at Rockbridge High, the all-American girl with her short blonde hair, pleated skirts, always-white tennis shoes, and what must have been the largest collection of cashmere sweaters in the county. Margie, vice president of the senior class, head cheerleader, and, for one brief moment, the most important person in Ike’s existence. That was over twenty years ago.
“Well, to what do I owe this honor? I’ve paid all my parking tickets, bought all the chances I can afford on the sheriff’s office annual raffle, and I don’t think anyone saw me coming out of the Carousel Motel last month, so what is it, Ike?”
“The Carousel Motel,” exclaimed Ike. “I didn’t figure you for the Carousel, Marge. Anyone I know?”
Marge grinned. “Don’t I wish? I guess you’re here about the robbery, although I can’t imagine why you want to talk to me.”
“Well, I could say it was just routine. That’s what they used to say on the TV, isn’t it, ‘just routine, Ma’am.’ But the fact is, there are some things that don’t make sense to me, and I thought you might be able to help.”
“Sure, such as what?”
“The timing, Marge. There is something screwy about the timing of the thing. If you were going to rip off the art, why do it now? Why not later, say, next month, after the college closed, or on the Fourth of July?”
“I don’t know, Ike. Stealing isn’t in my line of work. But if they had tried later, even a week later, they would have come up empty-handed.”
“What do you mean, empty-handed?”
“You didn’t know, Ike? The whole collection was being moved to New York next week. I thought that you would have been notified right away. With so much valuable stuff going through town, you should have known. Didn’t Ruth Harris’ office call you?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, Ms. Harris and I weren’t exactly communicating all that well then, and Parker would not have done it unless ordered to,” Ike said with chagrin. “But even so, we should have known. He’s dead, you know?”
“Who’s dead? Parker?”
“Conked on the head with the proverbial blunt instrument.”
“No loss there. Sorry, that was a terrible thing to say. But I have to tell you, Ike—”
“No need. You have to take a number and get in line to dance on that man’s grave. But back to the art collection, when was the move decided?”
“Gee, a week ago last Monday. You were there—I saw you when we all came out of the meeting.”
“I remember.” Ike thought a moment. Something someone said, then something he saw, but what?
“So that happened a little over a week ago. I know the names of most of the people at the meeting, but I don’t know anything about them. What can you tell me?”
“Not all that much. We meet once a year to rubber-stamp the decisions made regarding the collection, usually about things like air-conditioning, burglar alarms—things like that.”
Marge squeezed a generous dab of lotion into her hand from the tube at her side and began to massage it into her skin—shoulders, chest, stomach, and legs. The effect, Ike thought, was very erotic. He wondered if women were aware of the effect it had on men when they did that. He guessed they were.
“Marge, tell me more about the alarms. You approved them?”
“Oh, sure. Dillon senior is a gadget nut. He was always adding something new to the system. Then about two years ago, he had the whole thing redone, with a fancy central panel, laser beams, Star-Wars stuff. He had enough security put into that building to protect Fort Knox.”
“Well, not quite enough, it appears.”
“No, I guess not. They got through, didn’t they?”
“They did, indeed. Of course, if they had the plans and specifications, it would have been easier. When you all approved this new system, did you get a copy of the details? How it worked?”
“No, not really. We got a written description of the plan. You know, a list of all the elements, but we were spared the details.”
“Still, even that would help. The people on the committee, who are they? What should I know about them?”
“I can’t tell you much, Ike. They put me on the committee because they needed someone local, and I think they were looking for a woman. I was a ‘twofer.’ The other members are from all over. There’s Callend’s ex-president, Dan Clough. You remember him. Mr. Dillon, Charlie Two, grandson of the Mr. Dillon and son of the current Dillon patriarch, M. Armand, Sergei Bialzac, Ruth Harris, of course. Ben Stewart, the gallery owner from New York, Senator Rutledge, who never comes to the meetings, and me. You know most of them, I guess, except for Stewart and Dillon. Dillon is the shadow of his father from what I gather, and Stewart is a little swish if you know what I mean. I can’t see how any of them would gain from being involved. In fact, they all stood to lose.”
“How about insurance? Is Dillon in trouble, do you know?”
“I couldn’t say, Ike. From what I’ve seen of their annual statements, they may be healthier financially than General Motors.”
“Who else knew about the planned move?”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t know, Ike. Anyone might have known. It is not the sort of thing tha
t stays a secret very long. Small towns and small colleges are famous for their grapevines. I expect that just about everybody in town knew by the end of the week.”
“Everybody but me, it seems.” Ike let his mind wander over what Marge had told him. Something nagged at him, something she said that reminded him of something someone else had said, but who? When? He wrestled with the thought but it slipped away. He shook his head like an annoyed bear.
“What is it, Ike?”
“I’m trying to remember something, but I lost it. Something important.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Ike became conscious of Marge and her near nakedness. Her body, tanned and slim, could be the body of a twenty-year-old. He shuffled his feet.
“Well, I’d better be off, Marge. I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
Another period of silence followed while Ike tried to figure why he had not, in fact, gotten up to go. Then, with a sigh, he stood.
“Ike?” Marge’s voice was softer, almost girlish, “Can I say something to you that I’ve been meaning to say for, God help me, twenty years?”
“It couldn’t have been twenty years,” Ike answered in a half-hearted attempt at gallantry.
“It was, Ike, longer actually. I’m sorry for what happened that night.”
“Marge, it’s not necessary. It was a long time ago. We were very young.”
“I’ve got to. I have been sitting on this for a long time and it bothers me, even now. No.” She waved away his protest. “I told you I’d come to you that night, and I didn’t.”
Twenty-five years ago, the senior prom and Margie Davis, the most beautiful girl in the room, the only one who could wear a strapless gown and make you notice, with George Tice as her escort, as usual. Margie and Ike in the parking lot in his candy- apple red Mustang convertible, its top up, hers down, two adolescents fumbling their way to adulthood. Margie saying, “Not now, not here, I’ve got to get back. Georgie is looking for me.” And then, “Tonight, in the pool house, here,” and she pressed a key into his hand, “Meet me after.…” And she tugged the top of her dress into place, straightened the rest of her clothes, her hair, and darted away.
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