Class Conspiracy: A Hank Lancaster Mystery

by Ace Beckett

  When I switched on the television one channel was showing the remake of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None,” a brilliant classic mystery. I enjoyed her writing and liked reading about her Belgian Detective Hercule Poirot. We must use the “little gray cells” Poirot would say. I had a feeling I would need to use them in this case.

  The sheriff’s department was just about a 12-mile drive from my motel room. After I was fully awake – an event that consists of about two hours of me snoozing my alarm– I drove to it. Holly Oak was not a metropolitan area so I was expecting an old building in a laid-back shady area of the county. However, the Holly Oak Sheriff’s Department was a one-story marble and stone building that telegraphed efficiency and professionalism. I observed several deputies in dark green uniforms in the parking lot and walking in and out of the building. No man or woman was overweight and they moved with the confidence and discipline of an Army Drill Sergeant. The dark green uniforms were crisp and sharp, their silver badges reflecting in the sunlight. Inside several people typed diligently at their computers. A green-clad receptionist didn’t even look annoyed as I walked in, rather she smiled and seemed happy to see me.

  “Hello, sir. May I help you?” she said.

  “Yes, I read on your website that your office has a Public Information Officer. I wonder if I could see her for a few minutes,” I said.

  “Wait just a moment. I believe Officer Highland is free. Let me check.”

  I thanked her. A minute later she returned and said go down the corridor and Officer Highland was in the second door on the left. She was a tall lady with brown hair but, like the receptionist, looked delighted to see me. She stepped away from her desk, shook my hand, pointed to a chair where I sat down and asked how she could help me.

  “I’m Hank Lancaster, a private detective from Florida. About a month to six weeks ago a county resident named Mary Laurie died in a swimming accident.”

  “I remember the case, we don’t have many accidental deaths here. It was a tragedy,” she said.

  “I assume the case was investigated and I was told the department ruled it an accidental death.”

  She nodded. “We did. I wrote and released our official statement, but how does an accidental death in North Caroline interest a Florida private detective?”

  I gave a diffident smile. Explaining Stephen Bates to law enforcement officials was probably not going to be an easy job.

  “Ma’am, I have a client, a man called Stephen Bates, who believes the woman was murdered and he wants me to look into the case. I was hoping I could look at the case file.”

  Officer Highlands was not angry. Baffled might be the word to describe her face; Bafflement with a trace of amusement.

  “Mr. Lancaster, if you don’t mind, who is Mr. Bates and why does he think Mrs. Laurie was murdered? There was absolutely no evidence of crime in her death.”

  I sighed and trusted I could make the illogical sound a bit logical. I gave her a brief recap of Bates’ reasons – or lack there of– for his belief.

  “When Mr. Bates came to my office I liked him. He knows this is a long shot but he has become…somewhat fixated on this case and so I promised I would check it out.”

  The officer had a tone of disbelief in her voice. Well, I couldn’t blame her.

  “He is paying you for this?”

  “Yes but I told him it was probably money wasted.”

  For a long moment she said nothing, then shook her head and laughed.

  “I’ve heard a lot of strange tales Mr. Lancaster but I think that’s one of the strangest. I…” She laughed again. “Anyway the file on Mrs. Laurie’s death is not confidential. I’d be happy to provide you with all the information and items we have about the case.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  “We have several small conference rooms in the building. One is down the hall on your right, the last room in the corridor. If you want to go there I will bring the entire case file and you can look at it at your hearts content….Er, but perhaps before I do, you should show me some identification. Just to be official, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I showed her my driver’s license and my private detective’s license and a photo of Astrid and I. Also had a photo of me sinking a 20-foot putt at the Marianna Butte Country Club but figured she probably didn’t want to see that one.

  Three minutes after I sat down in the conference room she plopped two thin folders on the desk. One was full of written reports but the other showed photos of the late Mrs. Laurie after she was pulled from the water.

  I started reading the official police reports and coroner’s reports first. They were dry, concise and not much different from such other reports I had read. Even the medical reports showed Mrs. Laurie was in good condition with no medical problems. She was five-foot-six and weighed 142 pounds at the time of her death. The reports were definitely not an exciting read. I still had about a dozen pages to go through when I decided to check out the photos to take a break and then return to the reports.

  When I looked at the photos I was totally convinced that Officer Highlands was telling the truth that she said I could look at all their information on the Mary Laurie death. The department must have had a rookie photographer that day. He took pictures galore. He had pictures of her face, body, legs, feet and fingers and he took them from several different angles. Thankfully, a drowning death is not graphic as some. I had seen only two deaths by drowning in my career and, at first, I didn’t see anything unusual about Mrs. Laurie’s death.

  Then I blinked.

  I grabbed several photos showing her lower legs, ankles and feet and spread them out before me. Something troubled me. It could be nothing….

  Or it could be something.

  I blinked again. It was faint. For a moment I wondered if I was seeing something.

  But it was there.

  A thin, broken red line around her ankles, just barely visible, and after looking closer I saw an even redder mark was just below her right knee.

  Of course the marks might not be connected with her drowning considering the skin wasn’t even broken or didn’t appear to be.

  I put the pictures off to the side and returned to reading the reports. They continued to be uninteresting, but I was going to go over every line.

  Fifteen minutes later Officer Highland opened the door and asked if everything was fine. I held up one of the photos.

  “I wonder if I could keep one or two of these.”

  She shook her head. “No, this is the official departmental file. What I can do is run you off copies, with the high-tech computers we have nowadays copies don’t look bad at all, almost better than the originals.”

  “I would appreciate that.” I gave her three pictures. “Do you remember the officer who investigated this case? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “That would be Captain Forester. He’s in the station. I’ll go check if he can come back and talk to you.”

  I neatly piled up the papers and slipped them back into the folder. A minute later a uniformed officer came in that must have been a 55th cousin of Baliff Whitaker. Captain Forester was just as dark, but two inches shorter and perhaps twenty-five pounds lighter, but that still made him a big man. The silver badge on his green shirt gave him an air of authority.

  “Are you Mr. Lancaster?”

  “Yes, Captain, I am.”

  He stuck out the large right hand. “Captain Lem Forester. I understand you’d like to ask me a couple of questions.”

  “Yes, sir. If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” He eased down into a chair.

  “I am under the understanding you investigated the death of a Mrs. Mary Laurie some weeks ago?”

  “I did. I concluded it was an accidental death. There was no evidence of foul play.”

  I showed him two of the pictures and pointed to the light red line across the dead woman’s ankles. “Did you notice these marks? Is there an explanation
for them?”

  He nodded. “I noticed them and the slighter redder, larger mark on the back of the leg below the knee. I have no explanation for either. It’s a scrape that could have happened before she went swimming. I don’t know what made the marks on her ankles but there are so light they’re almost invisible. I don’t think they could be connected to her drowning. Why do you ask?”

  I didn’t want to go into detail again about Mr. Bates.

  “I have a client who thinks she was possibly murdered.”

  “A friend of hers?”

  “Well, not exactly. An acquaintance.”

  “I hate to break it to him but there’s no evidence of murder. Mrs. Laurie was married to Murray Laurie and his family has been in this region for four generations. He’s quite the go-getter. Mary complained once in a while she had to make him slow down and smell the roses. They were both members of the local Methodist Church and Mary usually attended a Wednesday night Ladies Bible Study, all of her friends said it was a happy marriage, she didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  “Why was she swimming so late? The report said the body was discovered about eight at night.”

  “The coroner estimated she died an hour, maybe an hour and a half before that. This time of year there’s still plenty of light at six, seven in the evening and besides she was a good swimmer. Usually she swam with friends but not always. She liked to swim and did it three or four times a week her husband told me. Sometimes she swam at the local health club, sometimes in the lake, her house wasn’t far from it.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, Captain. The questions may sound a bit silly but I have to ask them. My client is paying me top dollar and I want to give him good work.”

  Forester chuckled. “I can understand that but he’s barking up the wrong tree. We don’t have many murders in this county. I’ve been captain in charge of homicide cases for six years and there have been only four cases. Those were all quickly solved. We’re a peaceful bunch here in Holly Oak County. If there were any evidence at all, even a smidge, that there was foul play involved I would have started a fifth investigation, but there wasn’t.”

  I nodded. “Thank -you for your time.”

  Officer Highlands walked back in and handed me the three photocopied pictures. She was right, they did look as good as the originals.

  I got in my car and drove back to the motel. I turned on the television because I didn’t think Cross Creek had much nightlife, not that I wanted any. Not with Astrid waiting for me back in Florida. It was October and the baseball playoffs were going on. I hope the television had a channel that carried the games. Flicking through the guide I and breathed a sigh of relief. Turning on the game, I mixed a drink and sat down, watching the game I didn’t plan to get up for a couple of hours.

  With my smart phone I called Astrid. A smart phone is one of those wonderful high-tech machines that reveal how dumb you are when you first try to use it. I have some resistance to using a device that may well be smarter than I am but…it’s a high-tech age.

  Astrid was unavailable so my smart phone talked to her smart phone. In a short time, when Artificial Intelligence is perfected society will have AI police, attorneys, doctors and technicians. The smart robots will take over all the jobs. They may look around at the irritating, obnoxious, flawed flesh-and-blood creatures and ask themselves, ‘Why do we need them anymore?’ The answer will immediately come to the AI robots – “We don’t need them at all.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning I strolled two blocks to a Village Inn and had breakfast. Then I returned to the room but the two blocks walk convinced me Cross Creek was a nice, scenic little town. Florida used to be scenic and although some places still are, there’s a lot of ugliness and high-rise concrete in the Sunshine State nowadays.

  I spread out the three photos on the mahogany counter and stared at them. The red lines continued to catch my eye across the dead woman’s ankles.

  Something had bothered me about the pictures and finally I realized what. In my youth when I was avidly reading mysteries there was one that featured a very unique murder where a woman had drowned. The police believed it was an accident and there were no marks on the body. What had happened was when the lady was swimming a scuba diver grabbed her ankles and pulled her beneath the surface. Then let her go. She bobbed to the surface but was grabbed again and pulled under the water. The killer repeated the action time and time again and the lady eventually weakened and when the scuba murderer dragged her under the lake the last time there was little resistance, the victim was exhausted from the struggle.

  I stared at the pictures again. If there had been a murderous scuba diver in the lake when Mary Laurie went swimming… that would account for the red lines. Mary might have squirmed away once so the killer had to grab her more firmly to stop the escape, which would account for the larger, redder mark on the dead woman’s legs.

  I frowned. A questionable assumption on my part. If I were a prosecutor a defense attorney would shoot my theory full of holes. I had only conjecture, no proof.

  To be honest, I had less than that.

  The marks on Mrs. Laurie’s legs could be explained in other, non-lethal ways. Astrid enjoys hiking. It’s one of the things we disagree on because I don’t think walking around in the hot Florida sun should be classified as a sport. Occasionally I join her but often she goes with a female friend. At times when she has returned she has marks or red lines on her arms and legs, a simple explanation.

  But the red lines across Mrs. Laurie’s ankles seem to be circular…as if someone grasped her by the ankles.

  It was a flimsy theory not supported by many facts however. I frowned when I thought of long ago lines I had heard somewhere.

  “Will the theory hold up in court?”

  “Only if someone doesn’t turn on a fan.”

  My theory would hold up only if a fan wasn’t turned on and I wasn’t going to tell Mr. Bates about the red lines yet. He was leaning toward the murder scenario and telling him my supposition might cement his beliefs without the needed evidence. I shouldn’t give a client false hope or false belief.

  But I hadn’t expected to find any evidence of a murder so I had planned to leave the scenic town of Cross Creek quickly.

  I decided to cancel those plans.

  As I sat across the insurance desk of Murray Laurie I got a sense he was usually a vivacious man but he was subdued today. It was easy to understand why. He was a stout man with a pink face but a wide smile below the crew cut. He projected a sense of friendliness even though there was a subtle hollowness in his tone, along with a note of irritation.

  “I have never met Stephen Bates so I don’t know how to judge the man, Mr. Lancaster. Even though another classmate of Mary’s died recently I think his theory is silly if not ghoulish. There was no reason for anyone to kill my sweet Mary,” Laurie said.

  “I appreciate your feelings and I thank you for giving me some of your time, but I was wondering if an old classmate had popped up in town prior to your wife’s death. Someone she knew a long time ago?” I said.

  He shook his head. “No one knocked on the door to say hello if that’s what you mean. I know Mary kept in contact with three or four friends from her high school days, they communicated by phone and on Facebook. Off the top of my head I can’t think of their names but they were all female, although she would say hello to some of the guys in her class too. But no one traveled up to say hi during the weeks before her death, our life was very routine…and wonderful. I miss her very much.”

  I nodded. “Did anything unusual happen in the weeks before she died?”

  “No. We have a good friend at our church, George Hampton, and he always says he wants an uneventful week because usually unexpected events are nasty. Car accidents, notes from the IRS, trips to the ER are all eventful. So more than one church member has picked up his phrase and wished for uneventful weeks, or as one member said, she “wanted a George week this week.” A few days befor
e she died Mary joked about that, saying she was having a George month and that was fine. We were having a happy, uneventful week before she died.”

  “Did she ever tell you of an event that might have happened back in high school, something that might be strange or odd that stuck in her mind?”

  He shook his head again. “No, Mary often said she had a happy childhood and adulthood. No traumatic events. She enjoyed high school, always made good grades and had a fine social life. There were no dark secrets in her past, no dark secrets in her life at all for that matter. We were married seventeen years and if there were, I would have known. I thought Mary was extraordinary and a very special woman but she was – and I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense – an average woman. Her only sorrow in life was she was unable to have children but she was a wonderful aunt to our three nephews and two nieces.”

  “Was there anyone in high school she disliked?”

  The question sounded incredible lame when I said it as I was grasping at straws.

  For a brief moment he chuckled. “The only person I remember Mary saying a negative thing about was a guy who went to prison for…perjury I think it was. That was a scandal. She said the whole school talked about for weeks on end but that guy wasn’t in her class. I think he was two years older and I don’t even remember his name.”

  “A man named Tom Franklin?”

  “That may have been it. It was unusual because Mary, who liked everyone, said she disliked his father too. That’s why I remember it although it was years ago when Mary mentioned it. Before that I had never heard her say she disliked even one person, much less two in the same family. She had bumped into the father one time or another and she thought he was a cold, arrogant individual and so was Tom. Ironically she did like his brother, Chet, who was in her class. I don’t think they ever dated in high school but she thought he was very nice and a gentle man. She said Tom was arrogant like his father. She said Chet would joke with you while Tom would just look at people with disdain.