Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 04 - Country Comes to Town

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, so naturally I jumped a foot when the doorbell rang. It was Michelle, and I buzzed her in.

  “Have you applied for a bank loan recently?” she asked, as soon as she got in the door.

  “No.”

  “I knew it! I told myself, there is no way Laura would be fooling around with a loan when we’re in the middle of solving a murder. Not to mention the fact that your husband is out of town.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Today I got a phone call from somebody wanting to talk to human resources. Lucky for us, Sharon is out for a couple of days to take her baby to see her folks in Rhode Island, so I asked if there was anything I could help him with. This guy said he was from the Bank of Boston and he wanted to confirm your employment record for some loan you had supposedly applied for. Which I knew you hadn’t.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “I got a name, but no way do I believe it was his real one.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him our cover story, that you had worked for us up until last week and that you’d gone to work at SSI.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “Of course he believed me. I’m a convincing person. I’m just glad that I took the call.”

  “You and me both. And by the way, you’re not the only person to get a bunch of questions about me today.” I told her what Vasti had told me.

  “This is not good, Laura, not good at all. Somebody knows what we’re doing.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  “Where’s Thaddeous?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him since I left for SSI this morning.”

  “Oh, my God!” she said, her eyes getting big. “I’ve been trying to reach him since around ten—I thought he could meet me for lunch. That means he’s been missing all day!”

  I could tell she was starting to panic, and to tell the truth, I was getting close to that myself. “Calm down. I’m sure Thaddeous is fine.”

  “He could be lying in an alley somewhere. Or maybe shot. Or maybe—”

  “Michelle! Stop that! Thaddeous is a grown man—he can take care of himself.”

  “And Philip Dennis wasn’t a grown man?”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. All I could think of was that Thaddeous could be anywhere. I didn’t even know where to start looking. Should I call the police? The hospitals? What was I going to tell Aunt Nora?

  I made myself take a deep breath, then said, “Look, it’s just now six-thirty. I bet he got mixed up in the rush hour on the subway and got lost. The subway can be pretty confusing, and you know how men are about stopping to ask for directions.” This last was a sexist generalization, but I was hoping it would calm her down.

  It didn’t.

  “I don’t know why I let you talk me into getting involved in this,” she said. “It’s making me a nervous wreck, is what it’s doing.”

  I thought about reminding her that it was she who had insisted on joining as a full partner, but decided that it wasn’t worth it.

  “Let’s give him until eight o’clock,” I said. “If we haven’t heard from him by then, we’ll call the police.” I’d heard that the police wouldn’t actually start looking for a missing person until he’d been missing for twenty-four hours, but I knew I couldn’t wait that long.

  Michelle never would have been able to, either. I didn’t think she was going to make it an hour and a half. She kept muttering things like, “I’m going crazy here,” and “If he’s even a little bit hurt, I’m going to call my third cousin Vito and find out if he really is connected.”

  Her worry for Thaddeous would have been touching if she hadn’t been driving me up the blooming wall. The thing was, I didn’t have anything I could tell her to make her feel any better, so I just let her complain.

  Which she did for the next forty-five minutes, pacing up and down my living room, which really isn’t big enough for a decent pace, talking the whole time. I’d thought she had a vivid imagination when she was coming up with possible motives for Philip’s death, but that was nothing compared to the possibilities she came up with for Thaddeous’s absence.

  Finally, just before I’d have been forced to knock her upside the head just to save my sanity, the door opened and Thaddeous walked in.

  “It’s about time!” I said, but I was drowned out by Michelle.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been pulling my hair out here.”

  At least he had the good grace to look embarrassed. “Sorry. It took me longer to get back than I expected.”

  “What took you longer that you expected?” she asked.

  “Finding me an objective source.”

  “What is he talking about, Laura?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m fixing to drag it out of him if he doesn’t tell us about it right now.”

  “Well, I’d better start at the beginning,” he said.

  That didn’t surprise me. I’d never known a Southerner to start a story any other way.

  “This morning, after Laurie Anne left, I got to thinking. Last night we were talking about how everything we knew could be lies, and that the only way we’d know for sure would be to talk to somebody objective. Now, Laurie Anne’s been doing a real good job with the folks at SSI, but the one person she hadn’t had much of a chance to speak to was Philip’s wife, Colleen.”

  “You’re not talking fast enough,” Michelle warned.

  He did try to speed up, but as with most Southerners, talking fast doesn’t come naturally to him. “We’ve been wondering whether or not Philip had enough money for her to kill for, so I needed somebody who’d be likely to know, and who’d talk to me about it. Well, I don’t know many people up here, but I did see Philip’s family at the visitation. I even spoke to Dave a few minutes because he came outside to smoke a cigarette while I was there. We didn’t say much, but from what he did say and what he said inside, I could tell he doesn’t think a whole lot of Colleen.”

  “So you called him?” I said.

  “No, I didn’t think this was something you’d talk about on the phone. I went to see him.”

  “You went to see a complete stranger out of the blue?” I said. “And he talked to you?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” he asked.

  I thought about explaining to him what life in the big city was like, and how people wouldn’t talk to just anybody the way they would in Byerly, but I decided not to. What he didn’t know didn’t seem to be hurting him. In fact, it seemed to be doing us a lot of good. “But Dave lives in Worcester. That’s got to be fifty miles from here.”

  “About that. I looked in that guidebook you left me, and it said there was a train that went there, but I didn’t want to have to mess with the schedules. So I rented a car and drove there.”

  “You couldn’t have called one of us before you went shooting down the Pike to Worcester?” Michelle said.

  “I wanted to surprise y’all,” he said apologetically. “I thought I’d be home before y’all got here, but it took me right much longer to get there than I expected. And the traffic coming back was something fierce. I got stuck in one of those places where you go in a circle—”

  “You mean a rotary?” I said.

  He nodded. “I must have been in there a good fifteen minutes, just going round and round. I’d have called if I could have. Then I had to take the car back, and every phone I passed on the way back from the rental place was busy or broken. I’m awful sorry I upset you.”

  “You should be!” Michelle said, clearly not giving him an inch. She glared at him for a full minute while he shuffled his feet.

  Finally he said shyly, “I didn’t realize you’d be so worried about me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? You disappear when there’s a murderer running around loose, and you expect me not to worry?”

  I said, “We’re just glad you’re okay. Isn’t that right, Mic
helle?”

  “Hmmph,” was all she said.

  “Take your coat off and sit down, Thaddeous, and tell us what happened. Did you talk to Dave?”

  “I sure did,” he said, as he did what I’d told him to. “He’s a pretty good fellow.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Prince Charming,” Michelle said. “Did he have any dirt on his sister-in-law?”

  I would have thought that Thaddeous would be offended, but he just grinned at Michelle like she was the cutest thing he’d ever seen. He was hooked, all right.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I got to Worcester—am I saying that right? Worst-er? Wooster?”

  “It’s Worcester,” I said, pronouncing it the way Richard had taught me. “It rhymes with … you know, I don’t think it rhymes with anything.”

  “You guys …” Michelle said warningly.

  Thaddeous quickly went on. “I got to Worcester at around eleven o’clock, eleven-thirty. I looked Dave up in the phone book and got directions to his house, but when I got there, nobody was home. So I parked and waited.”

  “As cold as it was today?” I asked.

  “It was a mite chilly,” he admitted. “At half-past two, I went and found myself something to eat and warmed up in the restaurant. Then I went back over there. That’s when I saw Dave’s truck pulling into the driveway. It turns out he’s an electrician, and he’d stopped by home in between jobs. It took a few minutes to remind him of who I was and explain why I wanted to talk to him—”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I told him that I was in the neighborhood, and that Jessie had asked me to speak to him because the folks at SSI were worried about Colleen. I said that since the insurance money went back into the company, they were afraid that she wouldn’t have enough to live on. Only they didn’t want to ask her themselves because they didn’t want to embarrass her, and wondered if Dave and his family knew how her finances were.”

  “That’s not bad,” Michelle said, starting to thaw.

  Thaddeous went on. “Anyway, I offered to take him out for coffee if he had a few minutes, but he invited me in instead, which was mighty nice of him.”

  Michelle said, “It’s that Southern accent again. It charms the socks right off of people.” She was definitely thawing.

  “So we went in and he fixed us coffee, and he gave me an earful about Colleen.”

  “He doesn’t care for her, does he?” I said.

  “That’s like saying Georgia doesn’t care for Sherman,” Thaddeous said. “He didn’t like the way she treated Philip, and the way she talked about his parents behind their backs drove him crazy.”

  “Let me guess: it was Philip who told him what she said.”

  Thaddeous nodded. “I suppose I could have tried to break it to him that his brother wasn’t the most truthful man on earth, but Mama always says I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Especially not to a man’s brother. Anyway, Dave said he didn’t think Philip had left Colleen two nickels to rub together, which was fine with him. He said she made Philip buy their house, which had cost more than they could afford, and that she caused Philip’s problems at work, too.”

  “How did he know about the problems at SSI?” I asked. “I got the impression that he and Philip had been fighting for a good while.”

  “Dave didn’t want to talk about that at first, but he finally admitted that Philip had called him maybe a week or so before he died. Philip wanted to borrow some money because SSI was doing so badly, but Dave wouldn’t give it to him. Philip had already borrowed a lot from their parents, and he never paid the first penny of it back. Dave figured that lending him more would be throwing good money after bad. He told Philip not to bother talking to their parents again because Dave had made them promise not to lend him any more.”

  “Philip must have been fit to be tied,” I said.

  “You know he was. Dave didn’t go into details, but there were hard words on both sides. That explains why Philip didn’t go to Dave or his parents when Colleen threw him out.”

  I said, “It also explains why Dave was so rude at the visitation. He was probably feeling guilty about feuding with Philip the last time they spoke.”

  “He still feels bad, but like I told him, he wasn’t the cause of Philip’s being on the street. Philip had enough money to get himself a hotel room. I think Dave knew that, but he wanted to hear somebody else tell him.”

  “Well, it sounds like you’ve eliminated Colleen,” Michelle said, “unless we can come up with a better motive than money.”

  “And Dave and his parents are out of it, too,” I added. “If Philip owed them money, they won’t get it now.”

  “Dave said his parents could really use it, too. Even if you don’t count the money they loaned Philip over the past couple of years, they’re still paying on his college loans.”

  “Dave did tell you a lot,” I said.

  “Once he got to talking, I couldn’t have shut him up if I’d tried. I guess he needed to get some things off of his chest. Those two brothers had had problems their whole lives because Philip was so highfalutin and Dave was more down to earth.”

  I didn’t have any problem believing that. It was ages before Philip actually admitted to being from Worcester, which has the reputation of being a blue-collar town. He’d just say he was from the western part of the state.

  “Then I understand your being so late,” Michelle said. “It was real nice of you to help Dave that way.” She had warmed up enough to give him a peck on the cheek.

  All Thaddeous said was, “It wasn’t nothing,” but he was grinning so wide I thought he was going to bust.

  Apparently forgetting that I was in the room, the two of them made what my friends in junior high school used to call “cow eyes” at one another.

  I let them bask in mutual admiration for few minutes before clearing my throat and saying, “I hate to interrupt, but I’ve got some news, too.” First I told him about the phony loan officer who’d called GBS, and then I repeated the story Vasti had told me. “Why did Vasti have to be at your house when that man called? Aunt Nora wouldn’t have spilled her guts like that.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance it really was a writer, is there?” Thaddeous asked.

  “I doubt it. A reporter appearing right now is too much of a coincidence. Besides which, what writer in his right mind would promise to push Arthur in a true crime book? Even if he did, a book couldn’t be published in time for the election. This guy was up to something.”

  “Why would he be talking to folks in Byerly?”

  “Checking up on me. And you, too.”

  “What about me?” Michelle wanted to know.

  “I don’t know, but if I were you, I’d warn my family not to answer any questions from strangers.”

  “Who do you think it was?” Thaddeous asked.

  “All I know is that he had a Northern accent. Michelle, what about the guy you spoke to? What kind of accent did he have?”

  “He didn’t have an accent.”

  Thaddeous and I just looked at her.

  “All right, what I mean is that he had a Boston accent. Hey, couldn’t I call up everybody at SSI and see if I recognize the voice?”

  I said, “You could try, but there’s no way of knowing that whoever it was didn’t get somebody to call for him.”

  “I suppose that means we can’t even be sure that it wasn’t a woman who got a man to call,” Thaddeous said.

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. I guess it was a good thing that we had stirred somebody up enough to ask questions about us, because that had to mean that we were on the right track. But I didn’t feel happy about it—I just felt worried.

  Chapter 28

  “Okay,” I said briskly. “What do we do next?”

  Thaddeous said, “I don’t know, Laurie Anne. I’m fresh out of ideas.”

  I thought about what we’d found out as I got us all something to drink. “You know, there’s still one loose end we
haven’t followed up on: Vincent’s rat.”

  “No offense,” Thaddeous said, “but I can’t make hide nor hair of that rat. What in the Sam Hill does it mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted, “but I’m sure that it’s got something to do with MIT.” I fiddled with my class ring for a minute, and then I thought of something. “What you said about Philip and his brother has given me an idea. When I was in Vincent’s office the other day, I noticed a picture of him and his brothers, all of them wearing sweatshirts from their alma maters. One went to Harvard, one to Yale, and one to Dartmouth. And, of course, Vincent went to MIT.”

  Thaddeous said, “They must be a smart bunch in that family.”

  “And very competitive,” I said. “Vincent didn’t talk about them much, but I remember meeting his family at graduation, and they really looked down their noses at MIT. The brothers kept making cracks about nerds. Even Philip couldn’t shut them up. The fact is, MIT isn’t nearly as prestigious as those other schools.”

  “It’s done well by you,” Thaddeous said loyally.

  “I know it has, and I wouldn’t trade my education there for anything, but to some people, MIT is still just a technical college. It’s not Ivy League and never will be. The schools Vincent’s brothers went to are.”

  “What are you saying?” Michelle wanted to know.

  “Suppose you went to a lesser school than your brothers, and for some reason, you never graduated. In other words, what if Vincent never really earned his brass rat?”

  Thaddeous said, “Couldn’t he just finish up later on? Even in high school, they let you take classes over if you need to.”

  “He could have,” I said, “but only if he told people about flunking. If you were in a really competitive family like his, would you admit flunking a class? Especially if you were the kind of person who puts on airs, like Vincent does?”

  “I might not,” Thaddeous said.

  “If Vincent never graduated and Philip found out, that would have been one heck of a secret to hold over him. Not only would it have hurt Vincent’s credibility at work, but he’d have been humiliated if his family found out. I don’t know his wife, but it could have hurt his marriage, too.”