Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13

by Connie Shelton

  While Louisa dressed I jotted down the few names I remembered from the police blotter. We should probably go back there first and obtain a complete listing of all the complaints. When she came downstairs—in tweeds and sturdy walking shoes—I suppressed a smile and gave her a short briefing.

  “We’ll get the names and addresses,” I said. “There are quite a few so we should divide the list. Just engage each person in conversation. Do not represent yourself as working for the police.” I could see us getting into big trouble that way. “Find out if they had seen Dolly recently, and when. If it was within, say, the last month or so before she died ask about the circumstances of the encounter. Was there any problem, that sort of thing.”

  “Got it.”

  “If you run across anyone at all who was extremely angry with her, just back away. We’ll give their name to the police. I don’t want to end up in an English jail for our efforts.”

  “Right,” she said as we walked out the door. “At least it couldn’t be nearly as awful as the one in Marrakech.”

  I stared at the back of her tweed jacket as she locked the front door. Marrakech? Seriously?

  She chatted about how lucky we were that the weather had warmed up again, while I thought about all the family surprises I had in store for Ron when I got home.

  We got a printout of the complaints from the same clerk, Smith, who’d been behind the desk on my first visit. It was printed in sequence with the more recent complaints at the top of the list. Out on the sidewalk, I strategically tore the page and handed my aunt the half with the oldest of the reports. Surely she wouldn’t encounter anyone with fresh anger among those names. I’m used to trouble following me, but my place in family history would definitely have a black mark next to it if I let her get into serious danger during my visit. I was learning that she had a knack for that, all on her own.

  We took our lists, notebooks and, in my case, a map of the town and split up outside the courthouse. It was nine o’clock and we agreed to meet at the Angel Hotel for lunch at twelve and compare notes.

  I watched Louisa head up the block with a jaunty step before I gave serious attention to my list. Some of the street addresses were vaguely familiar to me after days of walking this part of town. I spotted a coffee house with tables outside and took a few minutes to sit down and fortify myself while I made a few marks on my handy little map. Some of the streets were nowhere to be found, so I assumed they were on the outskirts of town or somewhere in the outlying countryside. For now, I would find the most obvious ones, which were mainly businesses.

  The Banyan Tree was a ladies clothing boutique that favored styles with a tropical and Eastern flair. I stuck my notes into my purse and went inside. Sally Darcy introduced herself as the owner and I noted a young woman of Asian descent with dark hair stylishly cut. I flipped through a rack of bright print blouses.

  “A lady recommended this shop,” I said when she asked if there were anything she could help me to find. “Dolly Jones. She has the knit shop.”

  Sally’s face did a series of little moves, ending with a smile.

  “You remember her? I gathered that she shopped here quite a lot.” I continued to scoot hangers along the rail, keeping one eye on Sally as I did so.

  “Dolly used to shop here.” She was sizing me up every bit as much. “Is she a good friend of yours?”

  Establish some common ground with your subject. “Oh no, not really. I’ve only met her a few times. She seemed fairly hard to please.”

  “If you work in a shop, you’ll soon see that side of her.” The polite veneer was slipping.

  “Oh, I know. Once I heard her get into a terrible argument with a clerk.”

  “Nearly every time,” Sally said. “She did it all over town, but I finally had to invite her not to shop here anymore. Could not please the woman. Well, you see our style here. It’s not the sort of thing traditional English women of her age usually buy. But she would spot something pretty and buy it without trying it on. Then she would return it, inevitably. The last time she tried to return something she’d obviously worn and washed. I wouldn’t take it back. She threw the dress at my shop helper and kept yelling in the poor girl’s face. I had to pick up the phone and call the police before she would leave. She walked out the door saying she would never shop here again.”

  “I’ll bet your poor employee was really upset.”

  Sally chuckled. “She let loose with some choice words as Dolly left the shop, but she got over it very quickly. We joked that we were glad to see the last of her.”

  “Did she ever come back?”

  “No, and good riddance. I don’t need customers like that.”

  Two women that I guessed to be in their twenties came in just then and Sally put her sales face back on. While she showed them toward a rack of new jackets I murmured a polite ‘thank you’ and left.

  Obviously, Sally Darcy was no fan of Dolly’s but she certainly didn’t seem the type who would stalk the woman and make her life miserable, much less follow through and slip her a lethal dose of something. I scratched through her name on the printout.

  Since the friend-recommended-your-shop ploy had worked so well with Sally at The Banyan Tree, I tried it on a few other stores even though their names weren’t on the list. At the bookstore the face of the young clerk went blank at my question and even though I wandered into a different department in hopes of finding a manager, that person didn’t seem to recognize Dolly’s name either. In a small housewares shop I got a completely different reaction.

  “I’m frankly not at all sad that she’s dead.”

  The store owner was a woman in her fifties, who had greeted me with a warm smile and offered complimentary coffee and cookies when I walked in. As with Sally Darcy, Amanda Tremain quickly checked me out to be sure I wasn’t a close friend of Dolly’s before succumbing to the temptation to speak freely.

  “I’d say that she was thoroughly disagreeable,” Amanda said, “but that’s not how she presented herself. She’d come across all sticky-sweet at first, do you a few nice turns . . . liked to curry favor with anybody important. Oh, my, she catered to the mayor’s wife, loved to tell how she’d been to a party at their home. While her husband was manager at the sugar factory, she flaunted that around town a lot. It’s one of the bigger employers, you know.”

  I sipped slowly at my coffee, nodding at her comments, giving her time and encouragement to tell all.

  “You didn’t want to let her do you a favor though.” Amanda’s eyes narrowed. “You just never knew when you’d get the knife in the back. I got tired of having her come here to shop, then criticize the merchandise. Practically ruined my business, she did. Telling people my products were inferior, gossiping about me, saying I’d snubbed her because I wouldn’t give her a big discount on account of us being such dear friends and all. I had my fill of her.”

  “How recently did she cause all this trouble?”

  “Oh, it went on until about a year ago. Once Archie lost that job of his Dolly had to come down a peg. Tried to make out that it was her life’s dream to have that knit shop, but I know they moved there to make ends meet. Thought she had so many friends in this town, she did, and that everyone would come running to buy from her. Not that one—she’d burned too many bridges.”

  I decided to take a chance. “Do you know of anyone who would have been mad enough to harm her?”

  “Is that what they’re saying? That somebody killed her?”

  Uh-oh. Amanda could be just as big a gossip as Dolly and this story might be making the rounds of the town before noon.

  “No, not at all,” I hastened to say. How to soften this? “I’d heard that there were some odd incidents at her shop, pranks that left her shaken up. No, the coroner definitely isn’t saying anyone killed her.”

  Amanda looked as if the news disappointed her, but I got no sense that she had personally done anything to Dolly. She, like the other business owners in town, just seemed happy to have her out
of their lives. Before Amanda could get wound up with more stories, I changed the subject, ended up buying a small coffee press, and said goodbye.

  I still had thirty minutes before I needed to meet Louisa. A utility truck at the curb caught my attention, and I checked my list. Sure enough, it belonged to Raintree Plumbing. I approached the man who was in the process of pulling some lengths of pipe from the cargo area.

  “Joshua Raintree?” I asked

  “That’s me.” He set the pipe down and hitched up his pants.

  “I understand that you had a complaint against Dolly Jones for nonpayment of a bill?”

  “It’s about time,” he said. “I filed that complaint at the police station weeks ago. Thought you would never get around to investigating it.”

  He wiped his hands on a rag in the back of the truck, obviously hoping I’d brought the payment to him.

  “Oh, sorry, I’m not with the police department.”

  He studied my face for a moment. “Well, if you’re with the court and need information about it, I can tell you exactly what happened.”

  I pulled out my notepad and kept my mouth shut.

  “The lady—Mrs. Jones—called me. Said there was a leak in the cellar of her shop. Stone flooring was all wet. How much would I charge, she wanted to know. I told her my hourly rates and said I’d come by the place and take a look. Then I write her out a bid after I see the damage. It weren’t cheap—had to get special tools to lift that heavy square of stone flooring—but my price was reasonable. And she agreed to it.” He punctuated that last statement with a jabbing index finger. “I do the work, then she says it’s too high and refuses to pay. In fact, refused to pay the whole bill, not only the part she said was too much.”

  Funny that Dolly hadn’t mentioned any of this. She made it sound like Archie handled the whole thing. “So what did you do?”

  “What choice did I have? I’d lifted the access cover way under the dirt, crawled in there, fixed a section of pipe, put it all back. Well, except for the stone floor section. Told her the dirt should have some time to dry out first. I told her I’d come back and put the stone back when she had my money ready. And not before.”

  I made notes, for the sake of appearances.

  “You know what I think?” he said. “I think she just got pissed because I tracked mud across that shiny wood floor in the shop. With me boots.” He lifted a foot to show me that he wore treaded work boots. “Not like I could help it. Working down there in the mud, you know.”

  Had Dolly built that incident into something far more? Twisted the story of the tracks on the shop floor to somehow implicate this man?

  “So, what’ll happen now?” he asked. “About my money.”

  “I’ll present my findings to, uh, the right people and we’ll do our best to get you a check.” Somehow, some way I would talk Archie Jones into covering this. It was only right.

  Joshua nodded and turned back to the lengths of pipe and I walked slowly on. How could Dolly be so vindictive toward a guy who’d shown up to fix a water leak for her? And then to claim that some unknown entity had made the tracks on the floor . . . maybe the woman really did have a screw loose.

  With a glance at the thickening clouds, I pulled my jacket a little closer and quickened my pace toward the Angel. Louisa came in just minutes behind me and we took a corner table where an impossibly-thin girl in black greeted us and took our orders for glasses of water.

  “This is harder than I thought it would be,” Louisa said, shrugging out of her bulky tweed coat. “Certainly doesn’t take them this long to narrow down the suspects when it’s on the telly.”

  I laughed. “No, it’s nothing like that, is it?”

  We placed our orders for sandwiches. The place was filling up quickly and the cacophony of voices ricocheted off the hardwood floors, mirrored walls, and wood chairs and tables. Fairly confident we wouldn’t be overheard, I asked Louisa if she’d learned anything of interest this morning.

  “Not a single thing,” she said. “Some of the people on my list just said ‘Dolly who?’ when I mentioned her name. It’s no wonder the police don’t pursue these types of complaints. A few weeks go by and no one really cares.”

  I felt badly that I’d given her the oldest parts of the list. But not that badly—my own inquiries hadn’t exactly brought forth any hot suspects either. When our food arrived we put our lists aside.

  “I’ve got four more names,” Louisa told me as we stood outside on the steps after lunch. “I’ll give them a go and see what happens.”

  “So I’ll see you back at the house when we finish, whatever time that might be?”

  She gave my arm a squeeze, her energy revitalized after lunch. I saw a patch of sun on the parking lot and noticed that the clouds were breaking up. The sunshine bolstered my own mood and I consulted my portion of the printout.

  The next name on my list was the restaurant owner who’d had a run-in with Dolly over a dog. Funny, I’d never seen a dog at the knit shop or apartment and it never occurred to me that Dolly owned one. I found James Gilcrist at The Bowl and Platter, a vegetarian pub, directing his wait staff in the cleanup after the lunch crowd had left. He seemed like a precise little penguin of a man with a fringe of brown hair surrounding a bald dome, dressed in black slacks, white shirt and black vest.

  “Oh, I remember the instance very well,” he said, with a raised eyebrow.

  Chapter 18

  Gilcrist lowered his voice and stepped out of the path of the bustling waiters.

  “It involved a dog?” I asked. I’d led him to believe I was following up on his police complaint, without actually saying that I represented the department.

  “Don’t get me wrong. We all love our pets. I can’t allow them inside the restaurant, of course, but at the outdoor tables if the dog is kept on leash and minds its manners, that’s fine.”

  “But Mrs. Jones’s pet didn’t quite do that?”

  He rolled his eyes. “First, she wanted to bring the animal inside. One of those little fluffy things, very small. Well, I could envision hair everywhere. I told her it would have to be outside. But it was a rainy day and she didn’t want to sit out there. Got very indignant with me, informing me that this was the mayor’s wife’s dog and that it had the highest of pedigrees. The mayor himself would be very upset, she said, if he learned how rudely my establishment had treated his wife’s very dear friend.”

  His face grew livid as he went on. “Then she set the dog down on the floor and it proceeded to lift its leg on the podium. I stood right there and watched it. The woman didn’t even have the good grace to be embarrassed. She merely ordered one of my servers to wipe it up. She proceeded to take a seat at a table and call the creature up onto her lap where he began licking at the salt shaker. I had to call the police before she would leave. It was humiliating—but apparently not for her. She caused an even greater scene by shouting at me as she made her exit. I could have wrung her neck.”

  “Really?” Maybe this was my suspect.

  “Well, you know. It took all afternoon for my pulse to settle to a normal level. My god, the woman truly believed she walked on water.” He tugged downward at his short vest, straightening it.

  “Did you ever mention the incident to the dog’s owner? Undoubtedly the mayor’s wife would have heard about this. I’m curious how she took the news.”

  He drew himself up taller. “I never said a thing. However, I’ve heard things . . . she did somehow get the word and I heard that she was furious with Mrs. Jones afterward. Two of my customers were speaking of it one day, how Dolly Jones would never be invited to another society luncheon in this town.” He seemed to have forgotten that I might be making note of his comments, but I didn’t want to stop his gossipy train of thought.

  With Dolly’s love of being connected, this would have been a serious blow to her esteem. Maybe she’d had words with someone important and things had gone a bit too far. I thanked Gilcrist for the information and left.

/>   So far, my inquiries relating to the police reports weren’t netting me any solid suspects. But the more I thought about it, the more sensible that seemed. A person would have to be pretty dim to call in a complaint against Dolly and then proceed to torment her to death. It was far more likely that whoever was behind the pranks would have stayed very quiet about it. Shop owners and businessmen would simply brush her off. This was personal.

  Louisa might be able to tell me who Dolly’s friends were—if she actually had any. I headed toward her house, ready to settle in for tea or drinks or something, but I passed Lilac Lane and decided to stop in and say hello to Archie.

  “I’m doing all right,” he said when I asked. That thousand-yard stare was gone, although his face remained long and grayish.

  “I see you are packing up the shop.” A lot of the merchandise was gone—only some of the bottled oils, a few candles, and the less-desirable colors of yarns remained. Gabrielle stood in the far corner, wrapping each small bottle in paper and placing them into a carton.

  “I’ll move back to the house near Fornham. I’ve given the tenant notice.”

  I’d been under the impression that they needed the rental income and that the apartment in town was much less expensive than their large home, but I supposed with the shop closed there was no real reason he would want to be there. Plus, the apartment must hold painful memories of Dolly’s death.

  I remembered that I’d made a semi-promise to Joshua Raintree so I mentioned the plumbing bill to Archie. He obviously had not been told about the altercation but he pulled open a file drawer and came up with the invoice.

  “Sure, I’ll take care of it,” he said, placing it near the cash register.

  “Louisa was hoping to stay in touch with the ladies from the knitting group,” I said, the lie slipping out before I could catch it. “Would you happen to have a list of them? So she could get their phone numbers?”