The Crafty Teddy

by John J. Lamb

  Her reddened eyes widened with sudden fury. “Oh my God, could she have killed him?”

  “There’s absolutely no evidence she was at the museum.” I raised my index finger in warning. “And I’d strongly advise you to both stay away from her and not call her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll make it that much harder to catch Frank’s killer. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” she grumbled.

  “Besides that, we’re following up on other leads that aren’t connected to Marie. Which brings me to his phone call to you on Saturday morning at…” I flipped the notebook open. “Eleven-fourteen. Why did he call you at the office on a Saturday?”

  “I told him to. The spring term just ended and I was cleaning out some things. Besides, it was safer,” said Linda.

  “Because Merrit’s number wouldn’t show up on your home phone.”

  Linda nodded.

  “So, what did you and Frank talk about?” I asked.

  “He called to cancel our…time together. He’d planned to close the museum at about noon and we were going to meet for a few hours.”

  “At a motel?”

  “No, on the front lawn of Monticello,” she said wearily. “Of course, at a motel.”

  Knowing the sarcasm was merely to camouflage her grief and anger, I ignored the jibe. “What did Frank say?”

  “That there was a major problem at the museum and that he wouldn’t be able to make it.”

  “Did he tell you what sort of problem it was?”

  “Something about finding counterfeit artifacts at the museum. The fact is, I didn’t believe him. I thought Marie was having one of her regular migraines and he’d been roped into doing the grocery shopping or something. That happened sometimes.”

  “Actually, he was telling the truth. Did Frank say anything else?”

  Linda wore a haunted look. “Two other things. The first was that he’d already talked to the curator, who was on his way to the museum.”

  “Neil Gage?”

  “I think that was his name. Anyway, Frank said it was a huge mess and he didn’t know how long it was going to take to straighten it all out.”

  “And what was the other thing?”

  “That he’d finally decided to leave Marie and that we could begin looking for a home of our own. And do you know what I told him?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That he was just saying that to placate me and that I was tired of all his empty promises. I was mad. I didn’t mean it.” She looked disconsolate. “Those are the last words he heard me say and I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

  “Look, I hate to ask this, but if I don’t a defense attorney will: Where were you the rest of that morning?”

  “After hanging up on Frank, I went home.”

  “Can anyone confirm that?”

  “The Charlottesville police.”

  “Interesting. How’d they get involved?”

  “After about forty-five minutes, I realized there wasn’t any point in sitting at home stewing, so I decided to go shopping. I went out to my car and found that some creep had poured acid all over the hood,” Linda was fuming. “The paint job was completely ruined.”

  “That Chrysler out there?” I nodded in the direction of the parking lot.

  “It’s a loaner. My car is a PT Cruiser and I took it to the dealership after the police left.”

  “So, you called the cops and they came to your house to take a report? Were there any witnesses to the vandalism?”

  “No, but I knew—”

  She didn’t get a chance to finish the thought, because the door flew open with a bang and a man swaggered into the office like a bad guy entering a saloon in a Grade B Hollywood western. He was short and stocky, with a Mussolini set of the jaw and the sort of bright and malignant eyes you’d expect to find on a wild boar. It was a speak-of-the-devil moment, because you didn’t need a triple-digit IQ to know this was Jeffrey Ingersoll and he’d come for his truant wife.

  Ingersoll snarled, “All right, you adulterous bitch, I’ve had enough of your shit. Get your stuff. You’re coming home.”

  Linda was breathing raggedly through her mouth. “Jeff, I told you that—”

  “Shut your frigging mouth, or you’re going to be picking up broken teeth with broken hands.” He held up a fist. “Now, let’s go.”

  I stood up and adjusted my grip on my cane just in case I wanted to use it like an oversized nightstick. “Linda, do you want to go with him?”

  “No.”

  Ingersoll seemed to notice me for the first time. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but stay out of this, unless you want to find out what ICU is like.”

  “Mr. Ingersoll, I’m Brad Lyon from the—”

  He shouted me down. “Oh, don’t tell me! Are you some other guy that’s been screwing her? An old cripple? Jeezus, she’ll do anybody, except her husband.”

  My first inclination was to blurt, Yeah, and I can understand why. Instead, I kept my voice calm and firm, saying, “Look, I understand you’re upset, but the bottom line is that I’m not going to let you kidnap your wife.”

  Ingersoll showed an ugly smile, shook his head as if amused, and reached into the back pocket of his pants. A second later, a small blue steel auto pistol was pointed at my nose. “Oh, I’d really like it if you tried to stop me.”

  Sixteen

  The gun was only inches from my face, unpleasantly close enough for me to see two things: that it was an older model Browning .380 caliber and, more importantly, that Jeff needed some remedial classes in felony gunslinging. Although the hammer was cocked, the pistol’s safety switch was still on, which meant he couldn’t shoot. However, it would only take a quick flick of his thumb to release the safety, so if I was going to do anything stupid, it was now or never.

  Twisting my upper body so that I was momentarily out of the line of fire, I quickly raised my cane and chopped downward on Jeff’s right wrist. There was a metallic snap as he pulled the trigger and the gun’s hammer hit the safety mechanism. Less than a second later, there was another and slightly louder snapping sound as my cane struck bone. The pistol popped from his hand and fell to the carpeted floor. Jeff clutched at his wrist and howled with pain, while frantically scanning the floor for his gun. But before he could make a move for it, I grabbed him by a handful of pink Izod shirt and tucked the knobby handle of my cane under his chin.

  Pushing his head upward so that he could look into my eyes, I said, “Hey, did you ever see 2001: A Space Odyssey?”

  Jeff’s pupils were constricting with fear. “Yes.”

  “Remember the scene near the beginning of the movie when one ape beats another with a big bone like he was a piñata?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you so much as look at that gun again, that’s exactly what I’m going to do to you. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Sit down.” I shoved him into the armchair.

  Jeff watched as I edged over and scooped up the Browning. He whined, “You bastard. You broke my goddamn wrist.”

  “Considering you tried to kill me, you’re lucky I stopped there.”

  “I knew the safety was on. I was just trying to scare you.”

  “Nice spin. You should be working in Washington.” Turning to Linda, I said, “Call the campus police and tell them there was just an attempted murder here.”

  Jeff peered imploringly at Linda with golden retriever puppy eyes. “Linda, please don’t. You know that I love you.”

  “Have you been smoking crack?” Linda lifted the phone from the cradle. “You killed the man I love and then tried to shoot a cop, and I’m supposed to save you? Go to hell, Jeff, and when you get there, say hi to my dad.”

  “He’s a cop?” Jeff blinked at me. “And what do you mean that I killed someone?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute,” I said.

  I removed the ammo magazine from the pistol and ejected a live
bullet from the chamber. The gun was loaded with nasty-looking hollow-point rounds, the same kind of ammunition cops carry for its knockdown power. As I handled the piece, I noticed that my hands were still a little jittery from adrenaline palsy.

  Putting the unloaded gun on the desk, I said, “Okay, Jeffy, let’s talk.”

  Jeff tried to look imperious. “I’ve got nothing to say to you. I want my lawyer.”

  “Good. That means you can take the fall for Frank Merrit’s murder.”

  “But I didn’t kill anybody!”

  “Maybe that’s true. But you just tried to execute one of the people investigating the murder of your wife’s lover.” I leaned against the desk and folded my arms. “A skilled prosecutor can connect the dots for a jury. It might not be the right dot-to-dot picture, but hell, it’s not as if we’d be sending the Dalai Lama to prison. Nobody’s gonna miss you.”

  “The guy she was screwing from the museum is really dead?” Jeff bit down on his lower lip.

  “Let me commend you on the earnest-and-puzzled expression. It’s the best I’ve seen in a long time. But you’re going to have to do much better than that to convince me you didn’t kill him.”

  “The police are on the way,” Linda said, hanging up the phone.

  “I am friggin’ puzzled!” Jeff was beginning to sound a little panicked. “What makes you think I did it?”

  “Because you knew about your wife’s relationship with Merrit, you’re a violent asshole, and you were in the Shenandoah Valley on Saturday morning.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “You damn liar, you said you were going to Waynesboro!” Linda shouted.

  “Yeah, what she said,” I added serenely.

  “Well, I didn’t go to Waynesboro!” Jeff yelled back at his wife.

  I held my hand up to silence Linda and asked, “How about Remmelkemp Mill? Did you go there?”

  “No. I never went into the Valley.”

  “So, where did you go?”

  From somewhere in the distance a police siren began to wail. It was joined a second later by two more, a synthesized and dissonant Greek chorus singing the keening theme song of modern human tragedy. The cops would arrive soon, so I had to finish the interview quickly.

  Jeff looked down at his wrist, which was beginning to swell and turn red. “I was up in Burnley.”

  “Where is that?”

  “North of here, almost up to Orange County.”

  “What kind of vehicle were you driving?”

  “My Mustang Shelby Cobra.”

  I wanted to say: Why is it that it’s almost always the little dorks that drive muscle cars? But time was short and I couldn’t waste any smoothing Jeff’s ruffled feelings. So I said, “Can someone confirm you were there?”

  “Yes…her name is Jeanette Sleeman.”

  Linda’s eyes bulged. “That skank with the fake boobs from your office?”

  Jeff’s jaw tightened and he looked out the window.

  I said, “I think we can take that as a big yes. What’s her address?”

  “One-nineteen Beck Road.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “From around nine until eleven-thirty.”

  “And once you were finished, what did you do the other two hours and twenty-five minutes?” Linda snapped.

  Although it was fun watching Jeff squirm, I held up my hand for silence again. “Sorry, Jeffy, but a girlfriend isn’t much of an alibi witness. Did anybody else see you there?”

  “No. Her ex-husband had the kids this weekend.”

  “Then you’ve still got problems.”

  Jeff looked back from the window at me. “What if someone could confirm that they saw me at eleven-forty-five?”

  “Can somebody?”

  “The maitre d’ at the restaurant at the Barboursville Winery. We went there for lunch.”

  “That’s a pretty busy place. Will he remember you?”

  “He should. We’re sort of…regular customers.”

  The sirens were growing very loud now and I heard a cruiser skid to a stop outside Stoller Hall. I said, “Linda, will you go open the door and wait there so the officers can see we don’t have a hostage situation here?”

  “And you had the gall to call me an adulterer. I’ll be gone by the time you post bond. Don’t come looking for me,” Linda said, glaring at Jeff as she went to the office door.

  I said, “I have just a few more questions. Do you smoke?”

  “No.”

  “How about Jeanette?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’ll assume the answer to that one is, yes. Okay Jeff, you say you didn’t kill Merrit, which might technically be the truth. But do you know who did?”

  Jeff looked dumbstruck. “You mean, did I pay to have him murdered?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Hell, no. I just figured she was having a fling. But if I’d known how she really felt about the guy, I…I suppose I should stop talking now.”

  “It’s the first bright thing you’ve done since we met.”

  A pair of UVA cops and a Charlottesville officer came into the office and they eyed us warily. I showed them my identification and handed them the gun. While I told the cops what had happened, Jeff tried to shout over me. He called me a liar, claimed I’d been the aggressor and offered his broken wrist as evidence, and when that didn’t seem to make the cops any more chummy, he began naming all the local politicians who were his friends. The sad thing was, the “servants of the people” probably would try to pull some strings for the developer, but I couldn’t let that concern me now. Then Linda corroborated my story and Jeff was arrested, but the officers couldn’t handcuff him because his right wrist was now about the diameter of a large coffee mug and just about as flexible. As they led him from the office, Jeff began moaning about the excruciating pain and the cops assured him that they were going to take him to the hospital before booking him into jail.

  After that, Linda and I followed the police car in our own vehicles to the campus police station to make written statements. We were allowed to use one of the department’s report writing computers, so I had my account typed up in less than thirty minutes. Meanwhile, Linda sat at another workstation, staring as if hypnotized at the winged toasters flying across the computer screen.

  Getting up to collect my papers from the laser printer, I paused to put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  She tensed her shoulder and I thought she was going to jerk away from my touch. Then she relaxed slightly and said, “I’m just numb.”

  “That’s understandable. Can you help me with one other thing? Are Jeff’s offices here in Charlottesville?”

  “Yes. They’re at the corner of Pantops Drive and Ring-wood. It’s the ugly cement building with a sign that says JRI Homes.” She looked up at me. “Do you promise you’ll call and tell me when Frank’s funeral is?”

  “The moment I find out. But—”

  “I don’t give a damn whether Marie will like it or not. I’m going. It’s what a wife would do.”

  “I agree. Take care of yourself, Linda.”

  It was almost noon by the time I left the campus police station and the sudden transition in temperature from the air-conditioned atmosphere inside to the tropical environment outside was like a physical blow. I moved into the shade of a huge oak tree and called home on my cell phone. As the phone rang, I frantically tried to think of some innocuous way to break the news that I’d nearly been shot that wouldn’t give my wife a bad case of déjà vu.

  Ash picked up, and seeing my name on the caller ID screen, said, “Hi honey. How did it go?”

  “Everything went really well. She confirmed the relationship and said something interesting: When Merrit called her on Saturday, he was doing it to break a date, because he’d just spoken with Gage and told him to get over to the museum ASAP.”

  “But Gage said Merrit just left a message on his answering
machine.”

  “Which was conveniently erased, so we only have his word the message ever existed.”

  “But why would he lie?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we’ll have a better idea once we take a look at the museum’s acquisition policy. How are you coming along with the bears?”

  “I’m trying to be very careful, so it’s going slowly. I’ve taken the Bruin teddy apart and I was right. It’s new excelsior and the growler is made out of plastic.”

  “Which proves it wasn’t made in 1907. Has the workmanship given you any ideas as to who might have made it?”

  “Actually, yes.” Ash sounded uneasy. “But I want to take a look at that counterfeit antique quilt we took from the museum before I make a final decision.”

  “Do you think it’s the same artist?”

  “Possibly. The quilt is in the evidence room and I haven’t heard back from the message I left on Tina’s voice mail. She’s got to authorize a deputy to release it to me.”

  “Tina’s probably still in the autopsy.”

  “That’s what I thought. So, where are you now? Are you coming home soon?”

  “I’m just leaving the UVA police station and now I’ve got to run up to Barboursville to follow-up on a couple more leads. I’ll head home after that.”

  “Why did you have to go to the police station?”

  “Um…”

  “Brad, I thought you said everything went really well. Those were your exact words.”

  “Well, I was getting to that, and it did go really well…from a certain point of view. Ingersoll’s husband didn’t shoot me and I did get the gun away from him.” Meanwhile, I was thinking: Congratulations, Lyon. That was about as smooth as a gravel road.

  “What?”

  “I’m okay. There are no holes and I’m still full of O positive.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I know and I’m sorry. But I didn’t have any control over this. Linda’s husband, Jeff, came crashing into her office and pointed a gun at me. It was a real been-there-done-that moment, so I smacked him with my cane and now he’s in custody. That’s why I’m here at the police station.”

  Thankfully, Ash sounded a little less annoyed. “But why did he attack you?”