Death of a Toy Soldier

by Barbara Early

  “Careful!” both of them said simultaneously.

  They moved just enough that I was able to excise myself from the tight space and leave them alone to divvy up the booty.

  I glanced over at Dad, but he was fully engaged in conversation. My gaze swept the room and found an unoccupied folding chair opposite the two older ladies on the settee. They looked harmless enough.

  I claimed the chair just before a man approached from the opposite direction. I went to set my punch cup on a nearby table.

  “Ah ah ah,” one of the women warned. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” She poked the other lady in the ribs. “The family thinks it’s a Duncan Phyfe.”

  The ladies shared a brief giggle, then resumed their more somber, funereal expressions.

  I cradled my cup in my hands instead and regarded the two women. “Are you family?” While they resembled each other, they didn’t share many of the Wallace characteristics. These two had more playful, impish features.

  “Heavens no,” one of them said, waving a wrinkled, arthritic hand in protest.

  “We mustn’t sound too excited about that, dear,” the other said.

  The first turned to me. “We’re neighbors.” She pointed toward the side window. If I recalled correctly, there was an equally intimidating Victorian in that general direction.

  “How long have you been neighbors with Sy?” I asked. “I’m Elizabeth McCall, by the way.” I nodded in lieu of a handshake. No way was I going to risk losing this chair by standing up.

  “Always,” the first one said, her eyes dancing. “And I’m Irene Dedrick. This is my sister, Lenora.”

  “Sisters,” I said. And then Irene’s other comment caught up with me. “Always?”

  They grinned and nodded, all overly bright lipstick and dentures. “Both houses have been in the families for simply years. I was born in the house,” Irene boasted.

  Lenora sighed. “Because I was born in a hospital, I’m a second-class citizen.” But the twinkle in her eye proved her irritation false.

  “So you two must have known Sy pretty well,” I said.

  “Oh, good heavens, yes.” Lenora leaned closer to me. “The man was a total—”

  Irene interrupted with a loud throat clearing. “Watch your language among the young people,” she said.

  “I’m not that young,” I said.

  “How’d you know what I was going to say?” Lenora protested.

  Irene smiled coyly. “We both know what Sy was. Can’t change it now, and it doesn’t make any sense to try to hide it.” She gestured at the room. “Not a person here who didn’t know it.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t know him at all. I’m here with my dad.” I pointed to where Dad was standing, still working the room.

  Lenora shook a bony finger in his direction. “Your dad was the sheriff, right?”

  “Chief of police, actually,” I said. “Now retired.”

  “Thought I’d seen that face around,” Irene said. “He’s gotten older, but then, who hasn’t?”

  “He interrogated us once,” Lenora explained. “He was very nice about it, as I recall.”

  I could feel my eyebrows hit the ceiling. “My dad . . . ?” There was something a little enchanting about these elderly women in their polyester skirt suits and orthopedic shoes. Maybe it was the pixie-like mischievous grins. I liked them immediately. “Were you ladies being naughty?” I teased.

  They looked guiltily at each other. “Maybe a little,” Irene admitted. “But if you live next door to someone for more than eighty years, do you really think you’ll get along all the time?”

  “For a number of years there, we had a right good feud going,” Lenora added.

  “With Sy DuPont?” I asked.

  Irene winced. “Took a nasty turn in the seventies. All those wild parties over here.” She folded her arms and leaned back. “Leisure suits and disco music blaring at all hours. And we weren’t invited to any of them!”

  “Sy had wild parties?” I said. It didn’t fit with the antisocial-looking man in the pictures.

  Lenora waved off the question. “That phase didn’t last long. Confidentially . . .” She scanned the area to see who might be nearby, then said a little too loudly, in almost a stage whisper, “I think he was just trying to get laid.”

  Several smirks and titters from nearby betrayed the fact that she’d been overheard, and I suspected that’s what she’d intended all along.

  “Oh, look at her blush.” Irene pointed at me. “Been a long time since either one of us blushed like that.”

  “I wasn’t sure young people blushed anymore,” Lenora said. “Don’t let my sister annoy you. We can talk about something else.”

  I reached into my purse for my phone. “Perhaps there is something you can help me with.” I pulled up the picture of the toy. “If you knew Sy for such a long time, have you ever seen this toy before?”

  Irene took the phone first and squinted at it, moving it farther away from herself. “I’m afraid I didn’t bring my glasses.” She passed it to Lenora.

  Lenora rummaged through her gigantic mauve handbag and fished out a pair of reading glasses. “Well, will you look at that!” she said, scrutinizing the picture of the two boxers. “It’s Fred and Ginger.”

  “I think they’re actually boxers,” I said, hoping that Lenora no longer operated a moving vehicle.

  Lenora responded with a throaty laugh. “Oh, I know they’re boxers. You must think I’m blind as a bat. But when you wound it up with the little key on the bottom, they moved more like dancers than fighters. So we used to call them Fred and Ginger, and it made Squiggy so mad.”

  “Squiggy?”

  By this time Irene was laughing and trying to focus on the picture of the toy. Lenora continued. “Our father had taken us all to the pictures. Of course, children were mainly taken to cartoons, but our father said all that stuff was fluff and nonsense, so he took us to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Oh my, the dancing.” She clasped her hands together, cherishing the memories. “The costumes and the dresses that swished and swirled. And such high heels!” She brought her hands to her lips. “Fred and Ginger were the bee’s knees.”

  “But Squiggy . . . uh, Sy didn’t think so?” I asked.

  “He was a sourpuss even back then.” Irene handed me back the phone. “Sy had this toy, you say?”

  “I understand he intended to donate it to the toy museum,” I said.

  “Well, that explains what happened to it.” Lenora’s brows furrowed. “Where is it now?”

  I was taken aback by her question, which came out a little like a demand. Well, more than a little. Irene and Lenora were forces to be reckoned with. “I . . .” Then it hit me. I still didn’t know what had become of the toys. “I don’t know,” I finally said.

  But they weren’t going to let that pass unexplained. They stared at me expectantly.

  “A man brought it and some others into our shop to get an estimate of their value,” I finally said.

  “Sy?” Lenora asked.

  Irene shook her head. “Sy never went anywhere at the end. People came to him.”

  “The man I met was much younger,” I said.

  “How young?” Irene asked.

  “Forties maybe?” I said, then informed them about the suntan, pockmarks, and scrubs. When I got to the scrubs, Lenora got animated.

  “The aide dude!” she shouted.

  “Aide dude?” I asked, a little more quietly. Our conversation was garnering a few disapproving scowls. I leaned closer, but I wasn’t sure these two had a mute button.

  “The last fellow Sy fired,” Lenora said. “At least I think he was fired. Some of Sy’s health care aides got fired and some of them quit, but none of them lasted long, not with his sunny disposition.” She stopped, looking like she’d just remembered where she was. She did a brief sign of the cross before continuing. “I heard Sy yelling one day last week. Then that fellow stopped coming and that young woman took over. Real
ditz. My, was she bossy! Moved right in, for all the good it did. Sy died a couple days later.”

  “You must have seen a lot of Sy. When did he tell you all of this?”

  Irene waved off my question as if it were absurd. “Oh, we never talked to Sy.”

  “Not since the seventies,” Lenora said. “I think that’s what the nice policeman suggested.” She pointed back toward my father.

  “Then how did you know what was happening?” I asked.

  “Well,” Lenora said, “you might say that neighbors watch out for each other.” She leaned back primly in the settee, then allowed her gaze to rest on her sister.

  “You watch the house?” I asked.

  “No more than Sy used to watch us,” Irene said, although she squirmed a little when admitting it.

  “So you think the man I met, the man with the toy, was Sy’s health aide?” That explained the scrubs. I couldn’t recall if he was still wearing them when he was lying dead in the store. I tried to replay the image, but Dad had warned me that human memory didn’t work like a video recorder. If a witness didn’t remember something the first time he was asked, he wasn’t likely to remember it later. In fact, Dad insisted, witnesses would manufacture information at that later point, their subconscious mind supplying details the investigators wanted to hear.

  I snapped to attention. I found it weird to think of myself as a witness. When I cast a glance in Dad’s direction, he was staring at me, as if he were a part of my conversation as well. Keep going, I could almost hear him say.

  “Did you know his name?” I asked the sisters. “The aide, I mean.”

  “Well, we never actually talked to him either, you see,” Lenora said.

  “Oh, I did,” Irene said.

  “Know his name?” I asked. I hated to admit it, but beating Dad to a clue was getting fun, like making a good move in a strategy game and seeing things fall into place. I tried to dampen my own excitement. This wasn’t a game. We were talking about a man who had died in our shop.

  “Oh, no. I didn’t know his name,” Irene said. “But I did talk to him. Once. He returned our recycling box. They’d gotten mixed up at the curb or something. He was very nice about it.” Her countenance fell when she said that last part. “Too nice.”

  “Here we go again,” Lenora said, rolling her eyes. “You’ll see, it’s a great conspiracy.”

  “I never said it was a conspiracy,” Irene said. “Just an observation.” She silenced her sister with a dismissive wave and redirected the conversation toward me. “As you get older you’ll notice. Some people have no patience at all with old folks. We’re just a time drain and a burden. But not everyone’s like that.” She waved her finger at me. “But those who do bother with old folks, that doesn’t mean they’re naturally nice either.”

  I nodded. “Con men, for instance.”

  “Right,” Irene said. “Like the guy who wanted us to pay him three thousand dollars for a thousand-dollar roof repair. We get them all the time, and they always act like they’re there to help us, to keep our house from falling down around us. As if they’re doing us a favor when they take our money. Then there are the do-gooders.”

  “The do-gooders?” I asked. “What do they do?”

  Lenora rolled her eyes. “Good. They do good. I’ve never understood the problem.”

  Irene wagged a finger again. “It’s why they do good. Some of them, they’ll shovel your walk or rake your leaves if you take their pamphlet. Fine. I get them. Then there’s the kind that act all bubbly and interested, as if they’ve just met the Queen of England. But a little patronizing. Almost like talking to children.”

  I nodded again. Somehow I felt a little less guilty for letting my attention wander when an older patron came into the store and told a long story. “So the man . . .”

  “Seemed overly enthusiastic about working with old people,” Irene said. “I figured working with Sy would beat that right out of him.”

  “You never saw him with Sy’s toy?” I said.

  Irene wagged her finger at me again, and Lenora sat up agitatedly.

  “Oh, no,” Irene said, “we never saw him with the toy. If we had, there’d have been a lot more feuding going on.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because,” Lenora said. “Sy didn’t have any right to donate it to the museum or give it to that young man. The toy didn’t belong to Sy. He must have taken it, that scoundrel.”

  Irene dipped her chin in agreement. “Fred and Ginger belong to us.”

  Chapter 8

  Irene’s claim added a whole new wrinkle to the situation. Clearly she and Lenora had motive—that is, if Sy were the victim. I glanced up to see Mrs. Wallace discretely shoving the family silver into her pocket. The heirs apparent were falling over themselves in their attempts to acquire their share of Sy’s possessions. They, too, might have had a motive to speed dear Uncle Sy’s departure, but what reason might they have had to off their uncle’s health care aide?

  There was a tapping at the door, and before anyone could answer it, Ken Young pushed his way in. He was in casual uniform, a brief layer of snow clinging to the fur lining his coat and dusting the tops of his boots. He didn’t bother to remove them or stamp off the snow. He put his hands on his hips and scanned the room. “Who’s in charge here?”

  Mrs. Wallace ran to the door to meet him, as did Meredith and a couple of other contenders. This was going to be an epic battle.

  But Ken wasn’t going to referee it. He looked from face to face, and then addressed them as a group, loudly, so everybody could hear. “I wanted to let you know,” he said, “that I chased away a gang of young hoodlums casing the place this morning while y’all were at the funeral. I scared them off before they managed to break in, but let me know if you notice anything missing or out of the ordinary.”

  “Imagine that,” Irene said, “happening under our very noses.”

  “But we were at the funeral,” Lenora added.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Irene said. “I don’t like what’s happening to the neighborhood.”

  By this time Ken had spotted my father and made his way over to him. Several family members watched as the chief’s snow-covered boots also made the trip. Eventually a few of the relatives compromised enough to locate paper towels and clean up the puddles.

  Ken took off his hat and shook my father’s hand. “Well, well. We seem to be running into each other quite a bit. Did you know Sy well?”

  “Been called to the house before.” Dad folded his arms across his chest. “I imagine you’ve been here before as well,” he said coyly.

  I excused myself from the two sisters and went to join Dad. “How’s the investigation coming?” I asked Ken.

  “Which one?” Ken replied. “The investigation into the attempted break-in is pretty cut and dried. I’ve got a good idea who might be up to their old tricks.”

  “The other one,” Dad said. “Have you been able to identify the murder victim yet?”

  Ken shook his head.

  “I might have something,” I said.

  “Remember something new?” Ken asked. “Because if you would like to amend your statement, we can meet at the station.”

  “It’s not something I forgot,” I said, not liking his officious tone. “It’s something I learned here.”

  Dad took my elbow. “Liz, are you sure we should bring this up?”

  I didn’t know what Dad was concerned about, but this was information Ken needed to know. “I think the victim worked in this house. As Sy’s health aide.”

  Ken cursed under his breath. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

  “It means I might have helped you figure out who the victim was. I would think you’d be grateful.”

  Dad let out a sigh. Apparently I was missing something that these two experienced lawmen had already figured out.

  Dad leaned closer. “You see, Lizzie, this creates another problem. By tying the dead man to this house, it also puts in
to question how Sy died.”

  Mrs. Wallace shuffled over. Despite our muted tones, apparently the family had been listening. “But Uncle Sy died of a heart attack.”

  “Probably,” Ken said.

  “Probably?” Mrs. Wallace repeated, and a titter of comments buzzed through the room.

  Ken hung his head. “If there’s any question that his death might be part of another investigation, we really ought to have the medical examiner reopen the file.”

  Mrs. Wallace looked fit to be tied, and it might’ve been safer for Ken if she had been—and gagged as well. Her lips quivered, but no sound came out, until finally she said, “But we just got that blasted man buried!”

  When the family rushed him in protest, Ken put his hands up. “I’m not saying we’re going to dig him up. And I’m not saying his death is suspicious.” He glared at me. “What I am saying is that now Sy’s death might be connected to another open investigation. We will keep the family informed.”

  I tugged on my dad’s sleeve. “Is he saying that Sy might’ve been murdered?”

  “He’s saying he has to consider it. Which means the body most likely will be exhumed and more closely examined for cause of death. Tox screens and all that.”

  Mrs. Wallace stamped her foot. “You’ve got another think coming if you expect any of us to pay to put him back in the ground.”

  Ken looked like he’d be gladly willing to sink into the ground and take Sy’s place. “Listen, if we have to exhume Sy’s body, we will make sure he is . . . replaced. At the village’s expense.”

  While the relatives continued to pepper him with questions, Dad pulled me aside. “I’m afraid this doesn’t bode well for us, Lizzie.” I started to protest, but he went on. “I shouldn’t have dragged us here. Think about it. What does the man’s death in the shop have in common with Sy’s death?”

  I struggled to figure out what he was implying. Both deaths had taken place in Ken’s jurisdiction of East Aurora. Within a week of each other. And, of course, both men had apparently been in possession of the same toy, now fondly renamed Fred and Ginger. I still wasn’t sure what Dad was hinting at.