Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13

by Connie Shelton

  Although her handwriting wasn’t easy to decipher I found myself reading passages here and there. At the time she’d decided to open the shop, she’d met a lot of resistance from Archie. One entry said, “I simply had to put my foot down. We are doing this, I told him.” An entry dated a few months later said, “It’s started up again. I know it. I’ll find out who she is this time, not let it pass like I did five years ago.”

  I turned back to the beginning of the diary. Sure enough, there were entries expressing Dolly’s concern that Archie might be having an affair. He was out late, he traveled a lot, he was always in “business meetings.” But she didn’t know who the woman might be. She demanded that he stay home, she planned trips for the two of them, she tried to orchestrate a social set for them outside of his coworkers. If only they’d had children, she lamented, then Archie would be irrevocably bound to her. I scanned the ten or more pages that went along in this vein, but the journal didn’t yield much in the way of facts, just Dolly’s thoughts on how to keep a rein on her husband.

  A large gap in time between entries—things must have gone smoothly for quite awhile. Maybe Archie had stopped seeing Catherine—or whomever—for a stretch of time. Then, two years ago Dolly began another crisis and starting writing again. When this set of entries continued in the same vein as the previous, I began to scan. Would the woman just not let it go? She didn’t offer up a shred of proof. Only her inner demons seemed to fuel the thing.

  Of course, Archie probably really was having an affair. From Dolly’s notes on the things she said to him and the way she treated him, who would blame him? I became impatient and turned to the last entry in the book, dated within the last month, after the mysterious incidents at the shop had begun happening. “Archie and his woman are at it again,” she wrote. “This time they are trying to make me think I’m going crazy. Well, I’m not and I’ll not have this. If I have to chain him to the store to make him stay home, I’ll do it.”

  What? I paused and re-read that last part. Clearly, Dolly was not meekly accepting the idea that she was losing her mind. And nothing about that entry made her sound suicidal. This was a woman with a firm vision and a nutty plan for keeping her husband in line.

  I closed the journal and turned the book over in my hand. Did Archie know this existed? Surely not. I couldn’t imagine him reading these entries and not confronting Dolly about it, or not destroying the book after her death. She hadn’t gone to any extraordinary lengths to hide it so my guess was that he simply never pried into her things. She either felt confident that he wouldn’t find the journal, or she didn’t care if he did.

  That might be a whole new wrinkle—maybe she halfway hoped he would read the entries and, learning how much she wanted him to remain married to her, would simply give up any other plans. This was one psychologically messed up couple.

  Heavy footsteps sounded very nearby and my heart-rate flipped into triple-time. The staircase from the shop to the apartment must be fairly close to the one on which I was sitting at the moment.

  In a few seconds someone would be in the apartment, probably the men wanting to pack everything in readiness for the move. I gave a quick look upward at the door to the living room, decided against going back in, opened the door to the street and ducked out.

  Chapter 23

  The details of the journal, plus the cassette from the telephone answering machine were burning holes in my pockets. I felt like I had vital clues here, I just didn’t yet know what they were or how they all fit together. I got two blocks away and then pulled out the tape. It was of the micro variety and I wasn’t sure what type of machine would be required to play it—but I knew I didn’t have one.

  Somewhere in this shopping district I’d seen an electronics store. I wandered nearly eight blocks before I spotted it. A guy who could barely be out of high school sat behind the counter, ear buds plugged in, swaying to a beat that I could hear through his skull. I gave a wide wave of my arms to get his attention.

  I showed him the cassette and he looked at it as if it were from another planet. “It’s from an answering machine,” I said.

  “Wow—I thought those were all digital.”

  “In the olden days,” I said with a grin, “they used these.” I didn’t tell him that I’d come across one in my parents’ attic that used small reel-to-reel tapes. That admission would place me in the age of dinosaurs, for sure.

  “What I need to know is whether you have any kind of machine that can play this?”

  He turned it over in his hands. “Yeah, got it.”

  I followed him to a display shelf of small tape recorders. Lo and behold, there was actually one, a rather dusty unit. I would buy it if I had to but really, just to listen to what would amount to a very few minutes of messages that probably wouldn’t mean anything to me anyway.

  “Could I demo this?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure.” He opened the back of it to be sure the recorder had batteries in it, placed some there, and inserted the small tape. He handed it to me and stood there.

  “Privately?”

  “Oh, right.” He moved over to the sales counter and plugged the earbuds back into his head.

  I rewound the tape a short way and hit Play. A man’s voice, unfamiliar to me. “. . . another few weeks. These things take time.”

  Not enough info. I rewound the tape again and it began to play in the middle of a message from someone telling Dolly that the book she’d ordered had come in. I let the tape continue to play. That same male voice came on. “Archie, Nigel Trahorn here. Sorry I don’t have the answer you want, about the funds, it will be another few weeks. These things take time.”

  Nigel Trahorn. I knew that name . . . It took a few seconds to click before I remembered that he was the attorney in the photos at the news office. The man whose family once owned Dolly’s building. He’d been photographed talking to Archie at a social function. And now he was calling Archie about some money.

  The tape was blank after that. There was no date or time recorded with the message, so I had no way of knowing how recently Trahorn called. I rewound the tape once more. Three messages back, a woman offered condolences on Dolly’s death and expressed regrets that she’d not made it to the funeral. That had to have come in after Monday. So all the messages after that were very recent.

  So, what money would Archie be discussing with an attorney? An insurance policy, an inheritance, or tax issues were the first things that popped into my mind.

  I glanced toward the young clerk who had his back to me, bobbing to his own beat while he ran a dust cloth over merchandise that hung on the wall behind the counter. He may not have even remembered I was in the shop. I might as well learn all I could.

  I rewound the micro tape to the beginning and played all the messages this time. They came from the days immediately after Dolly died, which made sense when I thought about it. In her efficient way, she’d probably cleared the tape every time she retrieved messages. Archie merely let them accumulate.

  The entire collection consisted of a total of four condolence calls—all from women—then the one about Dolly’s bookshop order and the one from the attorney. Clearly, I’d exhausted any possible useful information I would get from it. I ejected the tape, pocketed it, then set the recorder back on the shelf. The clerk gave me a rhythmic nod to the beat of his own music when I stepped over to the door and mouthed a thank-you to him.

  Money changes a lot of things, and the realization that Archie was waiting to come into something could be a game-changer. Catherine already had money. I couldn’t see that Archie’s money would make much difference to her. Although his financial status might. If he could afford to move back to the nicer neighborhood, fit in again with her social set . . . well, that might make it more feasible for the two of them to really become a couple.

  On the other hand, why? If they’d continued their affair through the years when Archie lost his job and lived in the apartment above his wife’s knitting shop, Catherine could
n’t be all that hung up on his finances. I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around all the nuances, but then it could just be that I’d skipped breakfast and it was well past lunch time and I needed fuel.

  Knowing this would be my last lunch in Bury, I couldn’t resist—it was back to the Cornish pasty shop for another of those special treats. I carried the hot little pastry pocket of savory meat with me, picking at bits of the crust while I strolled the streets, mulling over the mountain of little facts I’d gathered about Dolly, Archie, her death and his secret life. Although the details were numerous, I couldn’t for the life of me piece together a murder out of it.

  In this day and age, people didn’t risk a lifelong prison term because they were unhappy with their spouses. Well, okay, some did. But Archie didn’t fit the mold. I got it that he had a hard time standing up to Dolly. Her own diary entries made it pretty clear that she was a heck of a determined woman. But the man had two legs—wouldn’t he have simply walked out the door if he were ready to end the marriage?

  Again, I came back to the money. Depending on what type of ‘funds’ Nigel Trahorn had been talking about, and how much it involved, that could very well be the piece of the puzzle that would make everything fall into place.

  I wondered how I would find out. Dolly might have had a large life insurance policy, or perhaps there was money in her name that Archie couldn’t access unless she died. But even if I had the name of the insurance company or the registration information for a bank account, what were the odds I could bluff my way in and learn the details?

  I realized that my little meal had vanished and I was standing near one of the hanging flower baskets at the east end of Lilac Lane. Bluffing is something I do pretty well, so before I could talk myself out of it I strode over to the storefront where a man was in the process of taking down The Knit and Purl’s hanging sign.

  I sidestepped him and went inside.

  “How’s it going?” I asked Archie, knowing at a glance that he was in a muddle again.

  He was alone in the shop, although I could hear voices of the movers down in the cellar. Archie’s hands fluttered above a file box which he’d begun to fill with folders from the drawers of the work area.

  “I sent Gabrielle out for some lunch and she’s not returned yet,” he said.

  The phone rang just then, apparently someone who was coming to pick up the store fixtures and wanted to know if this was a convenient time. Archie said it would be best to allow another hour.

  “They’ll be wanting this counter and the desk,” he mumbled.

  “Could you use some help? I’m pretty good with paperwork,” I said with a nod toward the box.

  “I could gather those up, file them neatly. You can always go through them later on, once you get settled.”

  He lost a little of the deer-in-the-headlights look.

  “Here,” I told him. “you pack the small items into this box. I’ll get the files organized into this other one.”

  I handed him a mid-sized cube of a carton and gestured toward the clutter of little office items—stapler, tape dispenser and such.

  “It doesn’t much matter if they’re neatly stowed,” I said. “Just fill the box and get one of the movers to take it away.”

  He followed directions well, and I guessed it was from years of practice. Once a woman entered the room Archie Jones just let her take over. A little weird, I thought, but in this case I planned to use it to my advantage.

  I pulled the banker’s box up beside the two file drawers and took a seat in the chair beside them. Even though I pretended to work quickly, I managed to get a look at each of the descriptive tabs. Everything looked pretty standard for any small business. There were folders for Paid Invoices, Accounting, Customer Contacts and a series labeled with business names that appeared to be the suppliers of various inventory items. I came across one titled Insurance, which I discreetly slipped under the box.

  Archie filled the carton I’d handed him and muttering something about needing another one, went off to the stockroom.

  I slipped out the insurance folder and opened it, keeping one eye toward the doorway where Archie had gone. Unfortunately, the policy inside was to insure the contents of the shop, not Dolly’s life. I filed it and continued.

  When Archie didn’t immediately appear I took a peek inside another folder labeled Bank Account. It too, was strictly business. The neatly folded statements were all in the name of the shop and the balance on the most recent one showed only about a hundred pounds in the account. Nothing else in either of the two drawers appeared to pertain to funds or money that might reasonably be the subject of the conversation with Archie’s attorney.

  I quickly jammed the rest of the folders into boxes and placed them against the far wall, well out of the way. When Archie came back I was standing there with a spare banker’s box in my hand.

  “What about upstairs?” I asked. “I could box up any files you’ve got up there.”

  His attention was drawn to a man in work uniform who’d appeared in the doorway.

  “We’re to disconnect the telephone,” the man said.

  Archie, clearly no multi-tasker, set down the carton he’d brought for the final office supplies and showed the man where the phone line came in.

  I pointed toward the ceiling, a questioning look on my face and he waved me toward the stairs. That was pretty easy. I didn’t wait for further instructions.

  With permission to enter the apartment and carte blanche on any files I might find up there I scoped out the place. The living room was pretty well filled to capacity with a sofa, two fat armchairs, a TV set and stand, and a coffee table that was way too large for the confined space. Clearly, all their furnishings had been purchased for larger quarters. I didn’t remember anything in the kitchen or bath that could remotely contain what I was looking for, and the only other choice was the bedroom.

  I’d not paid a lot of attention on my previous visit but now I noticed two good-sized boxes on a top closet shelf. I pulled them down. One was filled to capacity with photographs and personal letters, the family memorabilia that collects in the twenty-plus years that Archie and Dolly must have been together. I ran my hands through the packets of prints without opening them. The envelopes appeared to contain greeting cards, with a few personal letters tossed in. All were handwritten, many on pastel stationery. I turned to the other box.

  This was more like it. There were folders with income tax information. The forms were unfamiliar to me but the general gist of declaring one’s income to the government and paying a portion of it remains the same just about everywhere, I suppose. The only remarkable thing was that the amount of income on the most recent form, after Archie’s forced retirement, was dramatically less. I could see how the couple might have struggled with the change in lifestyle and finances.

  Another folder contained two insurance policies. I glanced at the door to be sure no one had sneaked up on me before opening them. The policy on Archie’s life had a payout that equaled about three years of his former income. The one on Dolly was for much less, only about ten thousand pounds. It certainly wouldn’t make Archie wealthy enough to risk a prison sentence in return.

  At the very bottom of the stack, was a large brown envelope. I pulled it out. The printed return address showed that it came from a law firm in London. It had been mailed to Dolly Hempsted Jones. Another quick peek toward the door while I bent the metal brad upward to open it. A document of about twenty pages came out, accompanied by a single-sheet letter on law firm stationery.

  Dear Mrs. Jones,

  Pursuant to our telephone conversation on this date, enclosed please find your father’s trust documents. As per the provisions of the trust, the entirety of Brian Hempsted’s estate is hereby placed into an investment account with the firm of Rodgers, Salen and Flagg. Further in accordance with your father’s wishes, your inheritance consists of the income generated by said estate, payable to you in an annual sum, for the first five years following
his death. Upon the fifth anniversary of his demise, the entire estate passes to you.

  Of course it was your father’s wish that you leave the bulk of the inheritance invested and adjust your lifestyle to living off the income alone. That, however, is your choice five years from now.

  It was signed by the partner named Flagg. I looked at the date on the letterhead. Dolly would have come into her full inheritance three months from now. A chance comment came back to me—she’d told Archie she had the money for something. I didn’t know what they were talking about at the time. A brokerage statement included in the packet showed an account balance of well over two million pounds.

  You can afford a lot of nice little somethings with that kind of cash.

  A more important question came to mind.

  I turned through the stapled pages of the actual trust document. It was written in typical triplicate-legalese wording but I was looking for one thing. And I found it. Upon the death of the beneficiary, the estate would pass to the beneficiary’s legal next of kin, her spouse. If she was unmarried at the time of her death and had no children, the estate would pass to the Royal Society of Orchid Growers.

  Here, surely, was Archie’s motive.

  Chapter 24

  I stuffed all the pages back into the brown envelope, pondering.

  In the days when he held his management job he probably pulled in about the same income that Dolly got from the interest on her trust. But his losing the job changed the whole picture. Archie could never get divorced from Dolly. That much was clear. And he didn’t dare wait until she inherited it all. The Orchid Society might be her father’s pet project but I doubted it was Dolly’s. She would have pulled the money from her trust as soon as legally possible and she would do anything with the money that she wanted. Including writing Archie out of her will if he did any little thing to piss her off.