Dead Broke

by Vannetta Chapman

  Tony and Agatha both stood as well. Apparently their impromptu meeting was over before it had properly begun. Tony took off his ball cap and glanced at Agatha as he ran his fingers through his hair. She shrugged. What could they do? They’d tried.

  But instead of walking toward the back door of the building, Julia stepped closer to Tony and acted as if she was brushing something off his shoulder. In a voice Agatha could barely make out, though she was standing right next to them, Julia said, “There’s something going down on the drug front.”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t know. They’re bringing in a canine unit from San Antonio.”

  “So it’s big.”

  “I guess.”

  “Who’s the informant?”

  “Anonymous tip. It must have been a good one, though. Bannister jumped right on it. Watch your back, Tony. When you and Agatha solved that last murder...” Here she glanced at Agatha, her expression softening a bit, causing Agatha to realize this woman wasn’t as hardened as she wanted to appear. “He thinks you solved that one to make him look bad.”

  “Not true.”

  “What’s true is relative. Bannister wants a win. He needs a win, and he’s not letting anyone get in his way.” With that announcement she turned and slipped back into the office.

  Ten minutes later they were seated at Sammi’s with two cups of decaf and a shared piece of German chocolate pie between them. Sunlight poured through the plate glass windows. The café was old, but sparkling in its cleanliness. The floor was a checkered black and white, the booth seats covered in red vinyl that was old, broken-in, and soft to the touch.

  “Tell me about Julia. She seems like an interesting person, and it’s obvious that you think highly of her.”

  “Julia’s a good person. Police departments are filled with good people...”

  “But?”

  Tony forked another piece of the pie, then nudged the plate toward her. “Law enforcement, by its very nature, involves a lot of politics. Every move an officer makes, a department makes, is scrutinized and questioned. Public perception matters. The city budget, and to some extent the police budget, depends on public approval.”

  “Now you’re talking about the current trend to defund police departments.”

  Tony shrugged. “It’s not really anything new. When times are good, citizens are happy for more of their money to go toward making their town safe. But if they think that isn’t happening...”

  “So there are financial pressures as well as logistical ones. I hadn’t really thought of that.”

  “Bannister has a lot of balls to juggle.”

  “Can you give me an example? And how does this relate to us?” Agatha sipped her coffee. The pie was heavenly, the coconut perfectly offsetting the smoothness of the chocolate, and she could tell the crust was homemade.

  “Well, for a detective or lieutenant or police chief...whatever hat you’re wearing...there’s the pressure to make an arrest and make it quickly. Folks watch a lot of TV, and they expect lab results back the next day and criminals behind bars soon after.”

  “Doesn’t always work that way.” She was thinking of Russell Dixon. She and Tony never would have caught his killer if they hadn’t stumbled upon the motive. It wasn’t great detective work so much as luck. They certainly hadn’t been trying to make Bannister look bad. “I suppose it’s important to at least give the perception that you’re making progress.”

  “Even when there isn’t progress to be made.” Tony thanked the waitress as she refilled their coffee mugs. He didn’t speak again until she’d moved on from their table. “Let’s face it—forty percent of murders are never solved.”

  “That many?”

  “More in some areas. Here, we have a pretty good record because murder isn’t commonplace. It happens, but people are still surprised by the violence of it.”

  “And they want to feel safe again.”

  “They do. That’s the department’s job—to give them that assurance as much as to catch criminals. In the best of times, one results in the other.”

  “But not always.”

  “No.” He put down his fork to indicate he was done.

  Tony always left her the last bite. She scooped it up with her fork, popped it into her mouth, and savored it. Chocolate and coconut—they were absolutely perfect together.

  As they walked back out toward his truck, she remembered Julia’s warning. “What was that about the drug thing? Why would Julia even tell you that?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see how it’s related.”

  “Yeah. I can’t either.”

  The ride home was largely silent. The day was sunny, there were few cars on the road, and Agatha thought it was terrible to spoil such a wonderful day by thinking about murder. There was nothing she could do about it anyway. She wasn’t a sleuth, no matter how much people chose to compare her name with that of Agatha Christie. She was a plain and simple woman running a bed and breakfast. She should stick to what she knew.

  Tony parked in his garage, then walked her back over to the B&B.

  “You don’t have to walk me home, Tony.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re not worried—are you? I’m not in any danger.”

  “Let’s just say my spidey sense is on high alert.”

  Agatha had a deep and abiding respect for intuition, so she reached over and squeezed his arm in appreciation.

  They made their way into the kitchen, but heard laughter coming from the living room.

  Agatha slipped into her room and tucked away her sweater and purse. Walking back into the kitchen, she stopped by the sink where Gina was washing vegetables. “What’cha making?”

  “Stew, with fresh cornbread and a side salad.”

  “Sounds wunderbaar.” Agatha tilted her head toward the living room. “Say, that laughter’s a nice sound.”

  Gina closed her eyes in exasperation. “They’ve been at it for the last half hour. I have no idea what’s so funny.”

  “Huh.” Agatha peeked into the sitting area. Daniel and Mary Hochstetler sat on the couch. Henry and Emma were in adjacent chairs. Tony was standing off to one side, studying them.

  In the middle of the coffee table was a platter of brownies.

  “You made brownies?” Agatha was surprised. Usually she was in charge of desserts and such. Gina preferred cooking the main course.

  “I did not. One of your friends dropped them off.”

  “One of my friends?”

  “Found them on the front porch, wrapped in a dish towel.”

  “No note?”

  “Nope.”

  “Huh.”

  She walked into the sitting room.

  “Agatha, come join us.” Daniel was smiling broadly. The expression completely changed his face, erasing the last ten years and apparently a world of worries. Even his wife, Mary, seemed more relaxed.

  “Sounds like you’re having a fine time.”

  “Oh ya. We were just telling jokes.”

  “Is that so?” She glanced at Henry, then Emma, then Tony. All three seemed clueless as to what was going on.

  “Have you heard the one about the Amish flu?” Daniel asked.

  “I haven’t.”

  “First you get a little hoarse, then you get a little buggy.”

  Agatha suppressed a groan, but Mary seemed to find the joke hilarious. Yikes. Had they found a bottle of the Hill Country wine she kept for special occasions? She snuck a casual look at their mugs, which seemed to be filled with coffee.

  Daniel wasn’t finished. In fact, Agatha was worried he was just getting started.

  “How many Amish people does it take to change a light bulb?”

  Mary piped in with perfect timing. “A what?” She slapped the couch beside her, laughing and blushing like a schoolgirl.

  Tony moved to Agatha’s side. He frowned and asked, “Where did the brownies come from?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “How c
an you have no idea? You’re serving them, in your house.”

  “Gina said someone dropped them off. Why? Is there something wrong with them?”

  The expression on Tony’s face was an odd mixture of alarm and amusement.

  Emma had moved beside Mary. “Would you like to walk out in the garden with me?”

  “Why not?” Mary popped up from the couch, but Agatha heard her as she walked out of the room. “Know what vegetable can tie your stomach in knots? String beans!”

  Henry sat in Mary’s place and tried to interest Daniel in the latest copy of the Budget. But Daniel had put his head back and immediately fallen asleep. His snores were actually more comical than his jokes.

  “What happened, Henry?” Agatha kept her voice low, not wanting to wake Daniel.

  “I don’t know. We came down when we heard them laughing. Daniel and Mary were sitting here, enjoying the brownies and telling one another jokes.”

  “Huh.” Agatha didn’t know what else to say.

  But she immediately forgot about Daniel and Mary Hochstetler and their sudden mirth. Because the sound of a police vehicle’s siren chirped twice, followed quickly by the pounding of boots on the front porch and a quick rap on the door.

  Chapter Nine

  Henry had never seen a canine unit in action, but he had a real appreciation for the intelligence of dogs. His own little beagle, Lexi, was quite smart. She’d actually saved him once, when he was in a very tight situation...one much worse than this.

  The Hunt Police officer talking to Agatha looked to be the same woman who had given them a ride in her police cruiser. Her name was Gardner, Granger...Griffin. That was it. Officer Griffin. Currently Officer Griffin was waving a sheet of paper in front of Agatha and demanding she be allowed to enter. “These men are from the Drug Enforcement Agency, and they have a warrant to search your house. We received an anonymous tip—a very credible anonymous tip.”

  “I don’t understand...search for what?”

  Tony was looking at the paperwork and frowning. Finally he pulled her and Henry aside and said, “Best just to let them in. I don’t know why they think there are drugs here, but I have a bad feeling it has to do with those brownies.”

  “It would certainly explain the Hochstetlers’ change in mood,” Henry pointed out. Of course he’d worked with teenagers—yes, even Amish teenagers—enough to know when one was high. He’d simply been a little slow to assign those symptoms to the older couple.

  “Brownies? How could they... Drugs? I don’t have drugs.” Then as an afterthought, she asked, “Should I hide the brownies?”

  “Wouldn’t do any good.” Tony nodded toward the canine unit—three German shepherds that were waiting patiently by their handlers’ side. All three had black muzzles, intelligent eyes, and coats that were in the main a light tan but gradually blended to a reddish brown.

  “If those brownies are laced with marijuana—which I suspect they are—the dogs will figure that out.” Tony shook his head and folded back up the warrant, then handed it to her. “There’s nothing we can do about it now. Just let them do their job.”

  Agatha nodded, returned to the front door and opened the screen for the officers, who thanked her and Tony.

  There was a moment when Henry thought they were going to have a serious problem. Gina had walked out of the kitchen, taken one look at the dogs and fetched a broom. “Oh no. Those beasts are not coming in this house. I just finished cleaning the floors.”

  Tony snatched the broom from her hands. “You and I should wait outside.”

  “Wait? Outside? While these dogs have run of the house?” Gina’s voice steadily rose in indignation. “This is a business and a home. You can’t expect me to let those dogs...”

  Henry didn’t hear the rest because Tony was literally pulling the woman out onto the front porch. Agatha meekly followed. Henry—realizing Daniel was still asleep on the couch—hurried back into the sitting room.

  He sat beside him on the couch, unsure what else to do. Thankfully Emma was still outside with Mary. Perhaps they’d take a long walk and not return until the matter with the police was finished. He could hear the officers upstairs, speaking one-word commands to the dogs, and the soft sound of paws padding from room to room. Leaning forward, he could just see out the front window. Agatha, Tony, and Gina were still on the porch, still arguing over whether the dogs should have access to the house. Peering more closely, he saw that it was mostly Gina arguing. Tony nodded repeatedly in an effort to calm the woman, and Agatha sat staring off across the property.

  Agatha was a gut woman. Henry and Emma both agreed on that. She was trying to do a gut thing here—offering a place of respite for both Plain and Englisch folks. Two murders and now planted drugs? Henry couldn’t think why such trouble had come across her doorstep. But then he often found himself at a loss for such questions.

  As a bishop, he’d tried for years to answer the question of why good people suffered.

  He could quote from the book of Job—all that he’d lost and all that he’d regained.

  He could trace from Abraham, through Isaac, David, and all the way to the minor prophets. They’d all endured terrible times.

  He could even remind those who were questioning of Christ’s suffering.

  But he’d learned that in the midst of difficult times it rarely helped to point out others’ trials. The best he could do was offer a sympathetic ear and offer to pray with and for the person. So that’s what he did now. He prayed for Agatha, for the authorities who were seeking to find Nathan King’s killer, and even for the killer himself—for surely no one was beyond the reach of God’s compassion and mercy.

  The DEA officers clomped down the stairs, dogs at their side. One went toward the mud room, another toward the kitchen, and the final officer, a woman with short red hair, came into the living room.

  She nodded toward Daniel, who had his head back, his mouth open, and continued to snore quite loudly. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Daniel? Just sleeping.”

  “It’s best if you wait outside.”

  “Yes, well, I would, but Daniel’s been having a bit of a rough visit, and I think it’s best not to wake him. So I’ll just wait here with him, if that’s okay.”

  The officer shrugged, as if it wasn’t worth her time to wake and move the man.

  The dog followed her around the perimeter of the room, and then they stopped in the center. The dog—Pete, apparently—sat and placed one paw on the coffee table.

  “Good, Pete.” The dog sat, wagging its tail and looking up at the red-headed officer, who was now speaking into a shoulder radio microphone. “We have an alert in the living room.”

  Henry didn’t know a lot about drugs. He understood it was a great temptation among the youngie. In addition, his community had the occasional adult who struggled with substance abuse. Once it had been a man who was prescribed painkillers. His use of the drugs all too soon resulted in an opioid addiction. Another man in his community had sold fentanyl to members, and a young woman had pedaled methamphetamines.

  Englischers thought the Amish were immune to such problems, but of course they weren’t. Each time, Henry had worked with the affected, their families, and local authorities to come up with a rehabilitation plan. The intervention that seemed to work best was one-on-one accountability. As long as someone was meeting with the person on a timely, regular basis, the problems could be held at bay.

  By and far, the most common drug he’d seen in his community was marijuana. Usually these cases involved youngies experimenting, but there were also times that older men and women used it to alleviate some pain—physical or emotional.

  So it was that those thoughts, the dog in front of him, and the officer’s words all blended in Henry’s mind into a dreaded certainty that Tony had been correct.

  Daniel’s sudden relaxing disposition.

  His laughter and jokes.

  Mary’s light-heartedness.

  The plate of
brownies.

  Someone had served Agatha’s guests marijuana-laced brownies. But the bigger question was if and why and how was it related to the murder of Nathan King. Because the odds that those two things were not related were two absurd to calculate.

  AGATHA WAS AT A COMPLETE loss for words as Officer Griffin slipped the cuffs on her wrists and snapped them closed. This simply could not be happening again. Just last year she’d been pulled into the police station for the murder of Russell Dixon, which of course had been ridiculous. She’d also had her wrists duct taped together by Russell Dixon’s killer.

  Now here she was again—handcuffed. How was it that this kept happening to her? She couldn’t make sense of it. Her thoughts kept jumping between that and this, between the past and the present.

  She heard Tony trying to reason with Griffin.

  She saw the DEA officers standing to the side of her porch with their canine counterparts.

  And then Lieutenant Bannister arrived, strutting like a very proud peacock. There was no mistaking the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.

  He accepted the evidence bag holding the brownies from Griffin. “Amish weed. Is that a thing?”

  Agatha thought of denying that the brownies were hers, but they had been in her house. Daniel and Mary had obviously eaten some. It certainly explained their behavior.

  Oddly enough, it was Gina Phillips who came to her rescue.

  “Jimmy Bannister, take those cuffs off Agatha this minute.”

  “Stay out of this, Gina.”

  “Stay out of it? You want me to stay out of it? Then you take those cuffs off her right now.”

  “Why would I do that? I have the evidence right here, not to mention the elderly man in there on the couch and his wife sitting in that lawn chair. They’re both so high they could barely give me their names.”

  “They didn’t know what was in the brownies.”

  “That makes it worse.”

  “No. It doesn’t, because Agatha didn’t make those brownies. If you’d just listen”

  “I don’t have to listen, Gina. Agatha can attempt to explain herself at the station.”