Reunions Can Be Murder: The Seventh Charlie Parker Mystery

by Connie Shelton

  “Okay, here we go,” he said at last.

  I pushed my plate aside to my left and wiped the crumbs off my fingers.

  “Here’s your highway coming in from the south,” he said. “Now—here’s your little map. See this spot here?” He pointed to a place where a small creek bisected a trail. “That there’s this same place.” He indicated a T on Willie’s sketch.

  “So if I get to this spot,” I said, pointing to the topo map, “I just take it from there on the little map?”

  “Right. Now Willie told me this map of his, it don’t follow no set trail. Guess he climbs over all kinds of boulders and stuff to get to his spot.”

  “Okay.” I was beginning to envision myself completely lost among the saguaros and rattlesnakes.

  Keith seemed to sense my growing uncertainty. “You can do it,” he assured me with a wink. “Jus’ take this map an’ follow Willie’s marks. Like these three little circles, one on top of the other? That’d be a rock cairn. Wiggly line’s a stream. Like that.”

  Uh huh. Sure. I rolled the two maps together and stuck them down in my purse. I was stirring sugar into my fresh cup of coffee when the door creaked. Randy Buckman walked in. He nodded a greeting my way.

  “Thought that was your car out there,” he said, taking the stool to my left. Keith poured him a mug of coffee and he busied himself with the ritual of sugar and cream. Took a tentative sip before he addressed me again. “Got the dental records back,” he said quietly. “It was Bud Tucker. I just went up and told Sophie. And we found something else.”

  “What? Out at the mines?” I asked. I noticed Keith at the back counter, wiping at non-existent spills, eavesdropping for the gossip mill.

  “Yeah. Well, actually, just above shaft number eight. Hidden in a clump of sage.”

  I raised an eyebrow, wanting to grab his shoulders and shake the information out of him.

  “Packet of mining tools wrapped in an old blanket,” he said. “Don’t know exactly what that means.”

  “No clues about who they belong to?”

  “Not really. It’s old stuff. I mean, not something you’d be able to go out and buy today. But not antique, either. Could easily belong to either McBride or Tucker.”

  I pondered that while I took another sip of my coffee. “You said they were hidden in the sage? Like someone purposely wanted them out of sight?”

  “That’s my guess. Everything was neatly wrapped, stuck between two good-sized bushes. Doesn’t seem like they would have just fallen there.”

  “Why would Willie hide his tools, then leave without them,” I mused.

  “Maybe they’re Tucker’s tools,” he countered. “Or maybe we have some unknown third party—or parties.”

  “Any other evidence?”

  Something in his face clicked shut. “Some. But with close to fifty searchers prowling around out there, anything as subtle as a footprint is long gone.” He chugged down the rest of his coffee and met my gaze straight on. “I’ve got as many law enforcement men out there as I can, but unless we find Willie’s body, I don’t hold much hope for ever knowing what happened out there.”

  He rose stiffly, his leather belt full of police gear creaking, and slapped a dollar bill on the counter. “Thanks, Keith,” he said, raising a hand to both of us as he walked out.

  “So, does that shoot down our theory that Willie took off to go mining in Arizona?” I asked Randel as he turned back toward me.

  “It might,” he said, rubbing one pudgy hand along the side of his face. “But I don’t count nothin’ settled until the cows come home.”

  I flashed him a look. Did people really say that? “Well, guess I better get going,” I told him. “Lots to do.”

  I gathered my purse and maps and left money for my breakfast.

  “You take care, Charlie.” He came around to my side of the counter, started to shake my hand, then converted it to a massive bear hug instead. “Take care.”

  “I will.” For some reason my voice was a little husky.

  Outside, the April wind had picked up, changing the sky from gorgeous and clear to a blustery near-Arctic temp that made me want to scurry for my winter coat again. Across the road, a tumble weed rolled by, lodging itself against the porch railing of an abandoned retail building. Another car pulled into the café’s parking area, kicking up a flurry of dust. I quickly turned my back to avoid getting my eyes full.

  “Deserved it, you ask me.” Two men clad in Levi’s and western shirts emerged from the dust-covered dark blue Pontiac. Their conversation came in snatches between gusts of wind.

  “. . . Bud Tucker . . . since that bank deal.”

  “. . . tempted to do it yourself?”

  The man on the far side of the car noticed me and closed his mouth abruptly. He tilted his head toward me in greeting then turned toward the café. The other man turned to give me a quick stare from under thick, dark brows. I offered a stupid half-smile and opened my car door, sliding behind the wheel as the two men stomped their boots on the wooden porch and went inside.

  Knowing they were probably watching through the windows, I backed out and cruised slowly up the highway into town.

  Why hadn’t I looked at this angle before? I’d been so focused on Willie McBride, placing him at the center of the picture, that I’d failed to consider that Bud Tucker might have been the real target here. He obviously had enemies—that much was apparent—and I hadn’t even bothered to ask some routine questions. I pulled over at a Historical Marker sign, one of those the State of New Mexico is fond of putting out with little tidbits of information about wherever you happen to be standing at the moment.

  Staring at the sign, but not really seeing it, I pondered Bud Tucker. I really didnker. at know anything about him except that he was Willie McBride’s buddy. Maybe I needed to ask Sophie some more questions about her father. I glanced around. I didn’t know where Sophie lived, but the whole town wasn’t much more than a mile-long stretch of highway and her little red car wouldn’t be that hard to spot. I pulled out onto the road again and cruised along slowly, not seeing another vehicle.

  A few cross streets bisected the main highway, attesting to the fact that the town had once been fairly good-sized. One of these dirt lanes meandered over the hilly terrain and appeared to lead to a large brick Victorian house near a stream bed. A flash of red caught my eye and I made a quick right hand turn and headed toward it.

  Sophie’s car sat outside, its paint oxidized out to nearly the same shade as the faded red brick of the house. The wraparound porch badly needed a paint job and the plastic hanging baskets around its roofline needed new plants. A gray cat perched on the chipped wooden railing, eyeing me suspiciously. A second cat, a calico, trotted up to me as I got out of my car, sniffed my shoe tentatively, then began to rub against the leg of my jeans. I reached down and scratched her ears, which brought a rumble of purring.

  “Charlie? Hi.” Sophie stepped out onto the porch, drying her hands against the legs of her jeans. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. Her hair was pulled back into its customary braid and her plaid shirt was tucked in neatly, emphasizing the slimness of her waist. “I’m just taking some bread out of the oven. Want a slice, with a hunk of butter melted over it?”

  Well, who could resist? I followed her through the front door.

  We walked down a wide entry hall, passing a parlor on the right, dining room on the left. The furniture consisted of simple, ranch-style pieces in pine with blue and green plaid upholstery. Victorian touches still showed in the woodwork and light fixtures. We passed a flight of stairs leading up to the second story--turned mahogany spindles topped by a thick handrail—and emerged into a sunny kitchen filled with the heady scent of baking bread. The walls were pale yellow and the uncurtained windows with their southern exposure held narrow shelves laden with pots of houseplants.

  “Have a seat,” Sophie invited, pulling a chair away from the heavy pine-topped table.

  Two loaves of bread sat, still in th
eir baking pans, on wire racks on the linoleum counter top. On the opposite side of the sink, a drainer held clean mixing bowls and utensils.

  “I was just about to cut myself a slice, and I’ve got hot water for tea.” She held up the kettle as a question to me.

  “Yes, please.”

  She pulled two mugs from pegs on the wall and started the tea ritual of dunking a teabag into the steaming water she poured into each mug.

  “This bread won’t slice real neatly while it’s hot,” she said, her back to me, “but I just can’t resist it when it’s right out of the oven.” She dumped each loaf onto a wooden board, turned t hem upright, and pulled a long bread knife from a drawer. “You heard about Pop, I guess?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry it turned out this way. Willie’s family still wants me to find him,” I said. “I’m just trying to make some sense of it all—your father’s death and how that ties in.”

  Sophie stopped slicing and rested the heels of her hands on the countertop. “I know,” she said, heavily. “I can’t imagine who’d want to hurt a couple of harmless old men.”

  She carried the two cups of tea to the table and turned back to the counter to pick up the blue willow plate with four thick slices of bread, which she set in the middle of the table between us.

  I set to work buttering a slice and tried to ask the question casually. “Did your father have any enemies?”

  “No!” The answer came too quickly and she realized it. “Well, at least I don’t think so.”

  I chewed slowly. The bread was heavenly. Sophie swirled the knife around and around, working the butter on her slice. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “Maybe.”

  “This is purely hearsay,” I began, deciding to get right to the point, “but was there something about a bank?”

  She looked at me sharply, like she wanted to ask how I knew that. “That goes back a long ways, Charlie.”

  I remembered the angry look on the man’s face at the café. Long time back or not, some people were still mad. “Want to tell me about it?” I asked.

  She sighed. “You really think it matters?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued. “Well, maybe so. Pop used to be on the board of directors for the local bank. Didn’t really work there or nothin’. He just went to meetings now and then. Guess it kinda sounded important, and it got him out of the house, a little time away from bein’ both mom and dad to a snotty little girl. Mom died when I was only about three or four. I don’t really even remember her. The bank position gave Pop a chance to have some buddies, you know.”

  “You were really young at the time?”

  “Oh, ten or twelve years old. I guess I was a pistol. Anyway, I was plenty old enough to take care of myself once or twice a month when Pop went out to his meetings.”

  I swallowed the last bite of my first slice and reached for another. “He ever tell you what was going on at the meetings?”

  “Nah. I didn’t care. During the day we worked the ranch together. I rode right along with the cowhands. Finished up to eighth grade in school, then didn’t see much point in it. Cows don’t much care if you can diagram a sentence or read Shakespeare.” She chuckled.

  “So your dad went to meetings . . .?” I prompted.

  “Well, yeah, he’d told me once, back when they invited him to be on this board of directors, he said ‘Guess I’m a prominent businessman in this town now, Sophie.’ He sounded kinda proud of that. Like somebody needed to tell him he was worth somethin’. Which is just a lot of horseshit, far as I’m concerned.

  “Anyway, I was just a kid so I didn’t ask much about it. But I do remember that was about the time we moved to this house. There was only about four or five fancy houses in town and here we were, living in one of ’em. It was somethin’, all right. Before that, we just lived out at the ranch--four or five miles out, it is—in a three-room wooden house. Not much more than a cabin. It’s still there. Pop moved back out there when I got married.”

  At my startled look she held up one hand. “Marriage didn’t last much longer than the ceremony,” she said dismissively. “It was more than twenty years ago.”

  “So, was the ranching business going that well, or did the big house have something to do with the banking?” I asked, getting back to the subject.

  “Don’t really know.” She picked up her second slice of bread and started buttering it. “Guess it might have.”

  “And the trouble? What was that about?”

  “I still don’t know that, to this day, I don’t. I just know that I was about fourteen, fifteen maybe. Workin’ the ranch every day, ridin’, brandin’ . . . you know. Sometime in there, the bank closed down, sudden-like. Bank president—can’t even remember his name now—he got run outta town, maybe went to jail, can’t really remember. Pop just went back to bein’ a rancher, ’cept we did get to keep the big house.” She stared at the ceiling for a long minute. “One time, lotta years later, after I was grown, Pop showed me the deed to the house once. Said ‘Don’t you worry, Sophie. This place is yours after I’m gone. No mortgage. It’s free and clear.’ ”

  I decided to share what I knew. I told her about the tiny snatch of conversation I’d caught at the café. “I don’t know who the men were. It just struck me that at least one of them was still very angry with your father and it had something to do with the bank.”

  Her eyebrows pulled together in the middle. “Can’t think who that’d be. Guess it might be just about anybody. I never did let myself get too wrapped up with the people in this town. Ain’t healthy. I like the ranch better.”

  “I wonder where I might get more information about the bank,” I said. “Is there a newspaper office here in town?”

  Sophie let go with a belly-laugh. “Now that’s rich,” she cackled. “You never lived in a small town, I guess. Newspaper’d be a joke here. Ever’body in town’d know the news before they could print the damn thing up.”

  I gave an appropriately chastened grin.

  "Times .“Course, the town used to be a lot bigger,” she continued. “Used to have a post office, even. That closed down in the ’50s. May have been a paper somewhere back there too. Just don’t remember anything about it myself.”

  I drained my tea cup and thanked her for the information as I left, my mind fast-forwarding to other possible sources of information. The calico cat rubbed against my legs again as I left and I shooed her away before getting into my Jeep. The obvious prime gossip-mill in town was Randel’s café, but I’d already been there once today. Besides, I wanted a little more background first so I’d have some intelligent questions to ask. The nearest town of any size was Carrizozo, so I headed there.

  An inquiry at the gas station was all it took to get the location of the newspaper office, where I was led into a surprisingly modern room complete with microfiche reader. The woman, who introduced herself as co-owner of the paper, assured me that all their issues dating back to the turn of the century had been stored on film. I asked whether she remembered something about a banking scandal in the ’40s but she didn’t. I loaded a box with film rolls dating from 1941 to ’45, deciding to start there.

  By five o’clock I’d scanned enough film to make a trapeze artist dizzy and still hadn’t come across the story. When the woman came in to tell me she was getting ready to close up for the day, I asked whether there was anyone else in town who might remember the story.

  “Well, sure,” she responded with a smile. “My father owned the paper until Joe and I took it over five years ago.”

  I smiled through clenched teeth. Why hadn’t I thought of this thirty rolls ago? “Could we give him a call?” I asked. “I’d like to come back tomorrow and look some more, but it would help if I had a starting place.”

  “Sure thing.” She punched the digits on the phone quickly. After a couple of minutes of ‘How’s Mom?’ and ‘Umm, your bursitis again?’ she got to the point. “There’s a lady here who wants to ask about some back issues,” she told him, handing the phone o
ver to me.

  I sympathized about his bursitis too and finally got him to settle on the topic at hand.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, finally. “Christmas of ’46. That was it. I remember it well, ’cause Molly—that’s my daughter there you’re talking to—she was born in November. There she was, just a baby, getting us up at all hours, and I had this big story to cover. Had to drive to Ruidoso to the courthouse to sit in on the trial of that banker fella. Just look on them film rolls. Molly’s husband, Joe, he put all that stuff on film for us awhile back. Works great, and you can print copies of anything you want to keep.”

  I thanked him for the information and told Molly I’d come back the next day to go through them.

  “Well, I have to be somewhere in the morning,” she said. “Tell you what—you could just stay here now and finish if you’d like.”

  “Really?”

  “No problem. Just shut off the machine and the lights when you go. You can just twist this little thing on the doorknob to lock up.”

  “That’s very trusting of you,” I said.

  “You have an honest face,” she said, smiling. “Besides, I’m just going to be shopping at the market next door.”

  “I shouldn’t be too long,” I assured her. “Now that I have the date, it should go pretty quickly.”

  She looped a purse strap over her shoulder and left me at the microfiche reader. I went back to the cabinet where she’d gotten the original film rolls and browsed them until I found the last few months of 1946 and early 1947. Starting with Christmas week, I followed the trial, then scanned backward to the first mention of the story on October 15th.

  BANK CLOSES IN WHITE OAKS, the headline read.

  Local residents of the town of White Oaks were shocked to learn that the town bank has closed its doors. “The first inkling we had was this morning when I went to make a deposit,” said local businesswoman, Betty Brierling. “At first I thought somebody had just forgotten to unlock the door. I knew it wasn’t a holiday. So I knocked at the door, then I peeked in the windows.” Brierling stated that she was shocked to see the manager’s desk was gone and the vault door was standing open.