“Horse hockey!” he yelled.
Only he didn’t say “hockey.”
Mother drew herself up indignantly. “I would respectfully request that you, as a servant of the people, refrain from using such foul language in front of my impressionable daughter.”
From infancy, I’d heard much worse from her, especially when she hit her thumb with a hammer.
“Besides,” Mother went on, “what proof do you have? I can show you the signed releases that indicate what the program is going to be about. Uh, and I’m also doing a documentary on our town’s boutique businesses, and—”
“Spare me the bull crap,” Brian said, although (yup) he didn’t say “crap.” He opened a desk drawer. “I have what we call in the business a smoking gun.”
What he held up was not, of course, a smoking gun, rather a little piece of black plastic hardly bigger than a credit card, reading Panasonic P2.
“Where did you get that?” Mother blurted.
“From Phil Dean. He thought it would be in his best interests to cooperate with actual law enforcement, as opposed to the Serenity branch of the Nancy Drew fan club.” Then, in response to my puzzled expression, Brian said. “It’s a disc, Brandy—the stored footage of the interviews your mother conducted. Under false pretenses, by the way.”
I frowned. “Did you have a warrant to get that?”
“Didn’t need one. As I said, Mr. Dean has been quite cooperative, particularly after I informed him that we knew of his conviction for third-degree manslaughter in a bar fight some years ago.”
Mother said huffily, “Chief Lawson, you are an underhanded, conniving so-and-so.”
“And you, Mrs. Borne, are a meddling busybody.”
Nobody, and I mean nobody, calls Mother a meddling busybody but me! (Looney Tunes was harder to take issue with.)
“You should be grateful to her, Brian Lawson,” I shot back. “She has saved this department’s bacon half a dozen times. Name an officer on your stupid department who has solved more crimes than Mother! You can’t, can you?” I should have stopped there, because what I said next was childish. “Know what? You aren’t my boyfriend anymore.”
That stopped him. As if I’d slapped him.
Finally he said, softly, “Was I ever?”
Which hurt. Truth does, sometimes.
Brian said, his tone almost conciliatory, “Look, I got you girls in here to give you fair warning—if I get any more reports of your interference, I won’t have any choice.”
“Any choice?” I asked.
“I’ll have to throw the book at you . . . both!”
Well, like Mother’s remark, that wasn’t very original, either. So why did it scare me?
Mother straightened regally. “May we leave? Or do I need to call our legal representation?”
That scared me, too—the thought of Wayne Ekhardt riding to our rescue in his Lincoln, sideswiping everyone in sight.
“Yes,” Brian sighed. “You can go.”
We did.
I halfway expected Brian to ask me to stay behind for a private moment. So that maybe we could make up (or at least pretend to).
No such luck.
In the hall, an attractive female dispatcher with chin-length reddish-brown hair and red glasses flagged us down.
“Are these your scissors, ma’am?” she asked, addressing Mother. “I found ’em by the plant in the outer room.”
Mother looked down at the small scissors the woman held in one hand. “Oh, my, yes. I’d been trimming the dead leaves. Thank you, dear.”
In the parking lot, back in the Buick, I waited before starting up the engine to get Mother’s tirade out of the way. She would surely rail on and on about how we had just been so ill-treated by Interim Chief Lawson. But what emerged from her mouth surprised me.
Her eyes gleamed behind the magnifying lenses. “We’re going to meet her in half an hour.”
“Who?”
“Heather?”
“Who’s Heather?”
“My new mole! The woman in red glasses who passed me this note along with my cuticle scissors, which by the way I was missing last night, after my evening bath.”
“When did you have time to recruit a new police mole?”
But Mother ignored that and handed me a scrap of paper, which I took and read out loud: “ ‘Library parking garage. South stairwell. Noon.’ ” I looked up from the note. “What does she want?”
“That is the question!” Mother said, quoting Shakespeare in a completely non-sequitur fashion. She settled back in her seat. “To the library, dear! That is, if you still want to continue assisting in my sleuthing, despite Chief Lawson.”
“Heck, yes.” Only I did not say “heck.” I also said, “And that’s our sleuthing, if you don’t mind, not your sleuthing. We established a long time ago that neither one of us is Watson.”
“We’re both Holmes sweet Holmes!” She patted my knee. “There she is . . . my little defiant Brandy. For a while there I’d thought I’d lost her.”
“Not on your frickin’ life!” I said. And actually I did say “frickin’.” Sorry to disappoint. “We’re going to find out who killed Bruce Spring, cost us our reality show, put Joe in the slammer, and endangered my son and your grandson!”
“That’s my girl!”
We drove off with considerably less drama than the dialogue that led up to it. The Buick needed a tune-up and the shocks were out, so we just jostled along.
It was a chilly, brief wait in the unheated garage stairwell. We’d gone straight there, with not enough time to do anything else before our meeting with Heather.
I was praying that the dispatcher would arrive soon, as Mother’s hyperjabber was starting to drive me bonkers.
“Isn’t this exciting?” my cohort in crime was saying. We were seated on the dirty cement steps, she one above me. “Very Deep Throat.”
That was us—the Woodward and Bernstein of Serenity, Iowa.
She continued. “Such a odd code name for an informant—‘Deep Throat.’ What’s the significance?”
I looked up at her. “You’re kidding, right?”
She looked down at me. “No, dear.” She lowered her tone to a gravelly mannish timber. “Did the informant have a deep voice?”
The stairwell door opened, a businessman with briefcase entered, and we had to scoot over to allow him to pass.
Mother went on. “Perhaps Deep Throat was a snitch under deep cover, who passed on information verbally—thus throat.”
“Mother, let it go. Or we really won’t ever get our books into Walmart. . . .”
The door opened again—please, Lord, let it be Heather—and my prayer was answered. First one in a while.
We stood, Mother moving down a step to slip past me and greet the woman.
“My dear,” Mother cooed, “this is such a surprise! And a pleasant one.”
“I don’t have much time,” Heather whispered. She had a deep, throaty timbre herself. “So just listen.”
She handed Mother a manila envelope.
“This is a copy of the coroner’s report on Bruce Spring. Also, there are photos of the ax.”
“Any possibility of viewing the weapon in person?” Mother whispered back.
The dispatcher shook her head. “It’s been sent on to Des Moines for analysis.”
Mother gushed, “Well, my dear, we can’t thank you enough—just let us know your terms.”
Heather frowned. “Terms?”
“Yes,” I said. “What you want for your trouble. But keep in mind we’re not rich.”
“Yes, dear,” Mother said. “We need a more quid pro quo kind of arrangement. A part in one of my plays, perhaps, or possibly an autographed photo of George Clooney, even prescription drugs, if you don’t abuse the privilege—you name it!”
The dispatcher’s frown deepened. “I don’t want anything from you. Only that you catch the killer. Oh, the department might eventually get him . . . but you two? You can do it quicker. I
mean, how many killers have they caught in the last year or two? Now, I must go.”
Heather opened the stairwell door, then looked back at us—were there tears in her eyes?
Had one of the murders we’d solved involved some friend or family member of hers? Was that the debt she seemed to think she owed us?
But her parting words said otherwise.
“I just don’t know what I’m going to watch on TV now that Bruce Spring is gone! He was the best reality show host around!”
I don’t know whose mouth was hanging open wider—Mother’s or mine.
Well, probably Mother’s.
Like everybody says, she does have a big mouth.
A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Tip
To attract more customers, offer a variety of price ranges on merchandise—high, middle, and low. But best avoid Mother’s innovative tactic (since rejected) of putting all the higher-priced items on the top shelves, the middle-priced on the middle shelves, and the low-priced on the low shelves. All that does is cause backaches for bargain hunters.
Chapter Ten
Chop Class
After our secret parking-ramp meeting with our new dispatcher snitch (whom Mother was now referring to as “Sore Throat” because of Heather’s husky alto), we headed home, arriving about one o’clock.
Knowing Mother would want to pore over the coroner’s report and evidence photos herself, I figured I’d wait for the Cliffs Notes. Sushi and Rocky had been promised a walk, and they danced around my ankles until I delivered, taking multi-tasking to new limits (two dogs, two leashes, one pooper scooper).
That took twenty minutes, but when I got back Mother was still going over the files, having taken over the dining room table. I made us lunch, finally getting around to those egg salad sandwiches.
Half an hour later, I brought the sandwiches, iced tea, and a bowl of chips in on a tray, set it down, and sat myself down, too. I positioned the tray and yours truly down a ways at the Duncan Phyfe, not wanting to put scrumptious sandwiches in too close a proximity to grisly evidence photos. I’d intended for Mother to come down and join me, but she was busy peering at photos under a large magnifying glass (the photos were under the glass, not Mother).
She glanced up at me, momentarily bringing the round glass to her face, magnifying an already enlarged eye behind its round frame, a terrifying effect perfect for an old B-movie horror flick. The Fly, maybe. Or Dr. Cyclops.
“Anything?” I prodded, nibbling the sandwich. Say what you will about Wonder Bread; it knows just what to do with egg salad, even if it doesn’t really build strong bodies twelve ways.
“I’ll need to study these further,” she said, tapping a photo with a finger. Even from my end of the table, I could see the pic was of the murder ax.
As for me, I was eating a potato chip, and not about to seek a closer look at a blood-caked weapon.
But I did ask, “Can they tell at this late date—the lab in Des Moines, I mean—if that ax was also the one used to kill Archibald Butterworth? Would there still be fingerprints after so many years?”
Mother frowned. “I doubt it, dear. But a DNA match from old blood should certainly be possible. At least, according to Gil Grissom and Catherine Willows.”
“I don’t think CSI reruns are admissible in court as forensics evidence, Mother.”
She ignored that and reached for a document headed CORONER’S REPORT—CONFIDENTIAL. “But now, this is particularly interesting. In fact, it changes everything. It’s a breakthrough, all right.”
“And you’re going to make me ask, of course.”
She nodded with a smile no more demented than Daffy Duck’s dodging the little man from the draft board.
So I asked, “What’s particularly interesting, Mother? How does it change everything? What makes it a breakthrough?”
“When you’re sarcastic, dear, I notice that you reflexively smirk, and that digs lines in the epidermis. Not a good idea for a young woman heading past thirty.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is it, already?”
“Oh, nothing much,” she said. “Just that our late producer Bruce Spring was not hacked to death by an ax-wielding maniac.”
“What?” A bit of chopped egg salad stuck in my throat, and I pushed the rest of the sandwich aside.
“He was strangled, dear,” she said as I was choking on egg salad. “Seems he was very much dead when he was, uh . . . disassembled. Pass me a sandwich, would you, dear? There’s a good girl.”
I pulled my chair around closer to hers. “If he was already dead,” I said, “why would the killer chop up the body?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Mother replied, munching. “To create the impression that this crime was a repeat of the Archibald Butterworth murder.”
“You mean, cast suspicion on Andrew? The prime suspect in the earlier ax murder?”
“Yes . . . or his sister, Sarah. She is a large woman, sturdy as a stevedore, easily several inches taller than Bruce. Many of the articles about the crime, over the years, have posited her as Archibald’s slayer. It even came up in the Bruce Spring documentary.”
“You think Sarah would be capable of killing her own father?”
Mother frowned in thought. “I couldn’t hazard a guess, dear, but you know, I have always felt there was something rather on the calculating side about her, a certain cold-blooded quality.” She leaned closer, conspiratorial. “She never married, you know.”
As if being single makes a killer of a woman. Being married seems a more likely cause.
“Maybe she is another Lizzie Borden,” I said, going along with Mother. “Didn’t you say the father was overly strict—almost cruel?”
“Yes. But by today’s standards, Ward Cleaver would seem such. Applying a belt to a bare bottom was a standard punishment then. And many fathers in those days believed in the old edict that children should be seen and not heard. That last, I must admit, has its appeal. . . .”
“What if,” I said, ignoring her last remark, “Archibald gave Sarah too much fatherly attention? The unwanted kind. That kind of abuse rarely came to light back then.”
Mother frowned. “A religious man like Archibald?”
“Hello! All those articles and that documentary, too, speculated that the oh so pious Archibald was having an affair at the time of the murder. Perhaps he was some kind of sicko behind his pious, proper public image.”
“Dear, we’re not trying to find Archibald Butterworth’s killer. We’re looking for Bruce Spring’s killer.”
“Unless that’s the same killer.”
She slapped the table with both hands and her pilfered files jumped. “It couldn’t be! Not unless either Andrew or Sarah or both of them are involved, and in that instance, why chop up the corpse afterward to overtly connect it with the other unsolved crime? If you had committed that crime yourself.”
I had no answer for that.
Mother continued: “No, the murderer was trying to implicate one or both Butterworth siblings, and your poor friend Joe just stumbled into the thick of things, confusing matters.”
“Then the original murder is irrelevant, except for providing a way to implicate the Butterworths.”
“Yes.”
“So solving the old murder is not a goal?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean . . .”
“Mother!”
“What is it? What’s wrong, dear?”
“It just occurred to me—this is terrible news for Joe.”
“What is?”
“Death by strangulation.” My hand went to my forehead as if checking to see if I had a temperature. “And it explains why Joe is still being held.”
“Not following you, dear. Do try to stay on point.”
“Here is the point: when this was an ax murder, the blood on Joe’s clothing wasn’t enough to suggest the kind of mess that violent crime would make.”
Mother clapped once and it rang in the room. “You’re right! A dead body, with no blood flow, would not create t
he likely arterial spray of an ax murder. . . . Are you going to finish that sandwich, dear? I’m working up an appetite.”
“Forget eating! I thought Joe was more or less in the clear, but he’s still in big trouble. And what about that cameraman friend of yours, who threatened to strangle your late producer? We have to solve this thing!”
Mother flew to her feet, pushed her chair away from the table, and began to pace along its length.
I let her pace and think, going over to have a look at the photos and even using the magnifying glass myself. What I saw made me risk interrupting her mulling process: “Mother . . . didn’t you see this? Didn’t you notice it?”
She was still pacing, barely paying any attention to me. “Dear, I’m trying to think. Please don’t bother me.”
“Hey! You! Listen for once!”
That froze her. She looked like a deer in the headlights, if a deer in the headlights had on glasses that magnified its crazy eyes.
“Take a look at this,” I said, gesturing with the magnifying glass.
She came over and peered down through. Then she reared back, as if alarmed. “Oh dear. I missed it. That’s it. That’s the key. The clue!”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “So. What now?”
She extended her arms, palms up, as if balancing something on them. “Obviously. A return visit to Andrew and Sarah Butterworth.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I groaned. “We were practically thrown out of there this morning. Couldn’t we just call Brian and hand this over to him?”
Mother gave me a hard look. “After the way he treated us?”
She had a point.
This time it was Andrew who answered Mother’s unrelenting doorbell-twisting.
Looking positively murderous, he growled, “I came home to find my sister in tears! Vivian Borne, you aren’t just a busybody, but a cruel and unfeeling monster. If you don’t stop bothering us, I’m calling the police. There are laws against such harassment!”
“That strikes me as rather an overreaction,” Mother said, pleasant, businesslike, and utterly unfazed.
Antiques Chop (A Trash 'n' Treasures Mystery) Page 16
