by Alice Duncan
“Quit being so grumpy,” I advised. “I truly appreciate your help in this, Phil.”
“Yeah, yeah. You always say you appreciate me. You never show it, though.”
Stunned, I cried, “Phil! That’s not so! You know I appreciate you!”
“As a collaborator,” he groused.
“As much, much more than that,” said I stoutly. “You’re the man I intend to marry one day, after all.”
“God help me.”
I left after that.
As it turned out, I didn’t get the opportunity to rifle through Edgar Calhoun’s home office that evening. Oh, we started out all right, Phil and me. He came to the front door shortly before midnight, wearing a heavy fleece-lined jacket, work boots, gloves, and his hat pulled low.
“Thanks, Phil. Looks like it’s cold out there.”
“Duh,” he said.
I went back for my gloves, a scarf and my own heavy coat, then rejoined him at the front door. I was remiss in not inviting him inside to wait in the warmth of the house, what there was left of it—warmth, I mean, not the house—but I didn’t want any of my family to hear his heavy boots clomping on the floorboards.
Luckily, since he was right and blackness loomed all about us, we’d both thought to bring our flashlights. Phil took my arm and guided me to the store. Even with two flashlights, it was difficult to see much, but we walked around the store and headed down the boardwalk toward Lee Avenue.
Shadows lined us on both sides, looming darkly, appearing ominous, and I couldn’t help but remember that there was a killer somewhere on the loose in our dumpy little town. We also made a whole lot of noise, blast it.
“I didn’t realize how loud our shoes would sound on the boardwalk.”
“It’s the middle of a freezing-cold night,” Phil reminded me. “We’re the only fools outside in it.”
“I hope nobody hears us and investigates.”
“Not many people live on Second here. It’s all businesses. Anyhow, when we get to Lee, we’ll be walking on the street, and we won’t make so much noise.”
“I suppose so.” I still didn’t like it, though. For all I knew, the chief might have taken his duties seriously and have a stakeout—I think that’s the correct word—on the Calhoun place. And then there was that murderer-on-the-loose thing. I felt creepier by the second.
Nevertheless, we made our way to Lee, walked down the steps to the street—I nearly broke my neck when I missed the last step because I couldn’t see it—and took off north toward the Calhoun house. Once we got there, I sucked in a deep breath and told Phil the plan I’d made out in my head before he came to get me. One doesn’t like to break and enter without a plan, after all.
“Walk with me to the back of the house where the office is.”
Phil lifted his flashlight, I suppose to see his way to the back of the house, but I smacked his arm to lower the light. “Don’t do that! We don’t want anyone to know we’re here.”
“Hell, Annabelle, it’s as dark as onyx out here. How are you going to find your way back there without your flashlight?”
I thought onyx was quite a poetic turn of phrase for the generally prosaic Phil, but I didn’t bother to say so then. “Betty Lou told me exactly where it is. We can find it if I only turn on my flashlight once or twice.” I hoped. There were a few leafless bushes around the house, and I didn’t fancy falling into any of them. But that was negative thinking, and I didn’t say so. “Then you wait outside while I climb in the window. You might have to boost me.”
Phil grunted.
Only we never quite made it to Mr. Calhoun’s office in the back of the house. That’s because I turned off my flashlight, turned, walked several paces in what I believed was the right direction, tripped, stumbled and almost fell flat on top of Herschel Calhoun’s body before we got there. If Phil hadn’t been there to catch me, I’m sure I would have driven the knife into his back even deeper than it had already been driven. As it was, I ended on my hands and knees, straddling the body. Talk about a rude encounter!
Chapter Twelve
Phil and I sat shivering in the police chief’s office. Oh, very well, I was shivering. I’m not sure about Phil, who hadn’t sat but sort of prowled around the office. Anyhow, while the weather was brisk, my shivers had more to do with finding another dead Calhoun than they did the weather.
“All right,” said Chief Vickers, still looking unhappy at having been called out of his warm bed on a bitter November night. “You say you were out for a stroll? In the middle of the night?”
With a glare at me, Phil said, “Yes.”
I knew that simple answer wouldn’t hold up under more intense questioning, so even though I yet suffered from shock, distress and leftover horror, I forced my brain into action. “I couldn’t sleep. Too many things have been plaguing me lately. So Phil walked with me for a while. He was doing a kindness for a friend.”
“I see. And you and your friend just happened to walk to the Calhouns’ house?”
“Yes!” I said, incensed that he sounded so suspicious of our actions. After all, we didn’t kill anyone. “Darn it, Chief, I’m worried about Richard, and fretting about him has me in a fidget. I couldn’t sleep, and Phil was kind enough to come over and walk with me for a while. We walked past the Calhouns’ place because . . . because . . . I don’t know why we did. I guess because I’ve been thinking about them so much. Anyhow, it wasn’t a conscious decision. We just turned north on Lee because we did.”
“So you and Phil here went for a walk in the pitch dark on a cold, moonless night,” said the chief, his skepticism clear for all to hear. Fortunately, the only folks there besides him were Phil and me. “Did he sense your inability to sleep by divine intervention or magic? Did he even have a clue about your restlessness before he showed up at your door?”
I didn’t like the tone of his voice one little bit. However, his sarcasm made me straighten my spine some. “No. I telephoned him at his brother’s house.”
“I’m sure Pete and his wife appreciated that a whole lot.”
“I answered the telephone,” said Phil, surprising me, as he wasn’t generally one for perpetrating lies. In this case, though, I guess he figured he’d better.
“And no one else heard it ring?”
“No.” Phil was firm.
Although my spine was a trifle stiffer than it had been when I first sat in the chief’s office, I still felt mighty shaky. After I’d nearly fallen on top of Herschel Calhoun, my shriek of alarm had roused the rest of the Calhoun family, not to mention neighbors on both sides of their house and across the street. Lanterns were lit everywhere (the electric company stopped service at midnight), and folks flocked to see what had caused such an uproar in the middle of the night.
Naturally, as soon as they saw Herschel’s body, more cries of fright and agitation were raised, and somebody must have called the chief’s house because he showed up not long after that. When he heard it had been I who had fallen over the body while out for an evening stroll with Phil, he’d looked at me sharply and asked us both to visit the police station with him as soon as the coroner and the undertaker were through with their business.
We’d had a couple of hard frosts by that time of year, and there were fallen leaves all over the place, including some sticking to my coat and scarf and hands. I brushed them off as well as I could. All at once, the terror I’d felt about a murderer being on the loose while Phil and I walked to the Calhouns’ house seemed more real even than it had while we’d been walking. I wanted to wash my hands, not primarily because of the leaves and dirt on them, but because I’d been in close contact with a dead body, and I was pretty sure I had blood on my hands, although it was too dark to tell for sure. I’m not sure how coroners and undertakers ever get used to their jobs. Not that it matters. I sure wasn’t going to become a coroner or an undertaker. At that point, even joining the police force was a stretch.
I don’t know how long the coroner and the undertaker
stayed at the scene, but it seemed like forever. Then Chief Vickers left his second in command, Frank Parker, who looked as though he’d put his uniform jacket on over his pajama top, to guard the scene. Frank also hadn’t bothered to brush his hair, which stuck out all over the place, and he appeared to be still half asleep. Yet another reason to rethink my desire to join a police department. I’d forgotten that you had to be available at all hours of the day and night in order to do the job properly.
Mrs. Calhoun had nearly fainted when she saw her precious son lying in the front yard of her home with a knife in his back, and it had taken a couple of her neighbors to get her into the house, weeping and sagging against them. Gladys showed up, too, in a pretty pink dressing gown, her face pale and ghastly as she stared down at the body of her late brother. More neighbors attached themselves to her and led her indoors. There was a lot of fumbling around because, even though there were lots of lanterns available, the light from them only lit patches of the moonless night, and folks blundered into bushes and flower beds and each other as they attempted to help the two women.
In other words, chaos ensued after my initial discovery of the body, and I’m not sure what time it was when we got to the police chief’s office. I only knew it was awfully late, and I also hoped Chief Vickers wouldn’t telephone my parents.
By the way, Chief Vickers had a wonderful hound dog named Harley. Harley had helped the chief on many a search. The fact that Harley wasn’t needed in this instance didn’t lessen my wish that he were there so I’d have something warm and friendly to pet.
“Nobody besides you heard the telephone ringing. I see,” said the chief. He turned to me. “And so you invited Phil to take a walk with you?”
“Yes. To clear my mind.”
“To clear your mind.” The chief cocked an eyebrow first at me and then at Phil.
“You know Annabelle,” muttered Phil under his breath, the rat.
I shot him a glower, but the chief sighed and said, “Yes, I do know Miss Annabelle.” He turned to me. “Listen, Miss Annabelle, I understand that you’re worried about your brother-in-law. I’m not surprised about that. But don’t forget that we haven’t stopped looking at other suspects.”
Eyeing him narrowly, I said, “Well, then, why did you have to haul Richard to the police station? He has a position at the bank to uphold, you know.”
“Annabelle,” said Phil in a warning tone. To heck with him. This was important.
“We brought many suspects to the station for questioning.” Chief Vickers scratched his head. “Now who the devil—sorry, Miss Annabelle—would have reason to kill Herschel? From everything we’ve learned, Mr. Calhoun was a shrewd customer—”
“He was a crook,” I corrected. Phil rolled his eyes, and the chief sighed again.
“Yes, so many folks have told me. It might interest you to know that we’ve found no indication of dirty tactics in his business records, however,” said the chief.
“Well, of course you haven’t! What you need to do is talk to the people he swindled!”
“We are doing exactly that, Miss Annabelle.” The chief sounded mildly irritated. Maybe more than mildly.
“Oh, bother!” I was so frustrated by that time, I darned near cried. But I wouldn’t allow myself to do that. Not in front of these two brutes. So I stated the obvious. “Clearly, Calhoun would keep clean records at the bank. He was probably keeping a second set of books somewhere else.”
“Where else?”
I frowned. “I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“Right.” The chief rubbed a hand across his face. “Anyhow, while Mr. Calhoun might have had something going on that was a little shady, I don’t know why anyone’d kill his son.”
“Maybe he was in on his father’s financial shenanigans,” I suggested.
“Except we haven’t found proof of any shenanigans.”
Aw, nuts. Everybody knew Calhoun had been a hound dog—with apologies to Harley, who’d never cheated anybody that I knew about—and a criminal. It seemed incredible to me that not an ounce of proof of his shenanigans had been found yet. “Have you talked to Armando Contreras?” I demanded. “He had to hire a lawyer to get him out of the mess Mr. Calhoun got him in when Calhoun tried to call in the loan Richard had arranged for him.”
“Yes, indeed. We’ve spoken to Mr. Contreras.”
“Well? What did he say?”
“That Mr. Calhoun had called in his loan. The bank can do that, you know.”
“But . . . but that’s not fair!”
“It doesn’t sound fair to me, either, but it was legal. Even Mr. Jaffa said so.”
“I thought Mr. Jaffa was the one who made Mr. Calhoun back off.”
“He did. But that doesn’t mean there was anything crooked about the matter. It was low-down mean, but that’s different.”
“Fudge!” I no longer felt like crying. What I wanted to do at that moment was resurrect Edgar Calhoun and kill him myself.
The chief heaved a big sigh. “Listen, Miss Annabelle and Phil, why don’t you go home now. Phil, you can see her to her door, right?”
“Right,” said Phil. He’d continued pacing the office as the chief and I spoke. Now he came over to where I sat huddled in my uncomfortable wooden chair. “You ready to go home, Annabelle?”
“I guess so.”
“Try to stay out of trouble,” advised Chief Vickers. “We’re going to start looking hard at you, Miss Annabelle, if you keep stumbling over bodies.”
I think he was trying to be funny, but I didn’t laugh. “I will,” I said stolidly. Then I took Phil’s arm, which was stiff. I got the feeling he didn’t want to support me any longer that night, and that made my heart plummet.
“We’ll probably have to talk some more tomorrow, Miss Annabelle,” the chief warned. “I’ll need to get a signed statement from you, since you’re the one who found the body. So you might want to let your folks know what happened.”
Oh, joy. Exactly what I wanted to do. Pa would be furious. So would Ma. Jack, the fiend, would be aggrieved that it had been I and not he who’d found yet another body. I’d be just as happy to give over body-finding to him, except that it would have made him swellheaded, and he was already difficult enough to bear.
Phil and I walked in silence for several minutes in the gloomy darkness. Our flashlights illuminated pinpricks of the boardwalk, but I still felt creepy, what with shadows glowering behind, beside and in front of us. I also knew Phil was mad at me, although I think his anger was unjustified. After all, I hadn’t asked him to come with me in order to find another murder victim. I’d been hoping he’d just stand watch while I went through Mr. Calhoun’s home office. But now he blamed me for getting him into yet another pickle. I kind of felt like crying again, although I’m not sure why. Phil’s annoyance? Shock at having found Herschel’s body? Exhaustion? Being scared by walking at night in a town where two murders had been committed?
Probably all of those things contributed to my puny state. That and the thought of telling my parents I’d been out prowling in the middle of the night with a man whom everyone expected me to marry. They might think we’d been doing something untoward, and we hadn’t. Well . . . I guess finding murdered people might be considered untoward, but you know what I mean—and we hadn’t been doing any such thing. Heck, Phil would probably have been delighted if we had been. Now he was just mad at me.
“I’m sorry I got you into this mess, Phil,” I said after we’d been walking for a while, picking our ways carefully along the shadowy boardwalk.
“Me, too,” he said, his voice snapping in the chilly air.
“It’s not my fault we found Herschel.” I regret to say my voice sounded whiny. “That’s not what I expected, darn it.”
“No, you just wanted to break into someone’s house and go rifling through their private records.”
“But it would have been for a good cause!”
“Right.”
Silence surrounded us again, except
for the clomping of our shoes on the boardwalk. Then I sniffed and said, “At least I don’t see how the chief can pin Herschel’s murder on Richard.”
“Huh.”
Phil’s mood and Herschel’s murder didn’t negate the fact that I wanted to go through that darned office, but I hesitated to bring up the subject with Phil. He was really on edge, and if I pushed him too hard he might just explode all over me. He was an easygoing fellow most of the time, but when pushed too far, he could show a hellish temper. I’d only ever seen him really angry once or twice, and I’d just as soon not be the one to provoke him into a temper fit a third time.
Crumb. I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps Betty Lou Jarvis might be willing to act as scout when I tried the office ploy again.
And how was I going to break the news to my parents that I’d found another murdered man?
Lord, life could be difficult sometimes.
We got to my house after what seemed like an entirely too-long walk, and Phil said a curt good night when we finally made it through the pitchy black to the door to the house. Feeling lower than dirt, I first went to the bathroom and washed my hands about three hundred times. Then I made my way to my room. When I looked at the clock on my bedside table, I learned it was almost three o’clock in the morning. I’d never been awake so late on purpose before in my life. This time wasn’t on purpose, either, come to think of it. I sat with a whump on my bed and tried to think of some way to tell my parents what had happened, without making them angry.
After considering the matter one way and another and upside and down, I came to the discouraging conclusion that there was no way to do it. They were going to be hurt and furious that I’d sneaked out of the house. Neither one of them would buy into the notion that I was only out for a stroll with Phil because I couldn’t sleep. They’d accuse me of butting into police business. Curse it! If only we’d found Herschel’s body on the Second Street boardwalk, my tale of merely being out for a walk would be so much more believable.
