Murder Takes to the Hills

by Jessica Thomas

  I picked up the phone. Sara was as relieved as the rest of us that Mickey was dead, though she tried not to sound too happy. No, they had had no sign of a trespasser during the night. She was horrified at my tale of the sheriff and his men.

  “Watch Jeffie,” she warned. “He thinks everyone considers him the fat, stupid country cop from the movies. The fact that it is true has not yet dawned on him. And he particularly dislikes people who are not locals. You might want to call Peter Minot. He’s not a criminal lawyer, but even if he went to Podunk U., he could go circles around Jeffie.”

  She did not offer to come down, and I was glad. I don’t think I could have stood kindness and pity at that point. Instead, I went out the back door, so as not to wake Cindy, and strolled down to where Dave Spitz stood at his lonely outpost.

  “Hi, Dave, it’s getting warm. Would you like a Coke or something?”

  He looked embarrassed. “No thanks, Alex. I’m okay.”

  I pulled out my cigarettes and offered him one. He started to reach for it, then pulled his hand back, as if he didn’t want to accept anything from me.

  “What was all the excitement earlier? Clues jumping from every bush?” I blew smoke casually and leaned against the other fender of his car.

  “I really can’t discuss that.” He turned beet red. “I—ah—look, Alex, it wouldn’t do either one of us any good if we were talking when Jeffie comes back. Which could be any time now. And—well—it might be a good idea if you had Pete Minot here. He’s a sharp guy.”

  He stunned me. They were treating us—me—like a prime suspect. Cindy had been right.

  “Thanks for the tip, Dave. Sara Blackstone already told me Jeffie has it in for nonlocals. I may give Peter a call.”

  I went briskly up the deck steps and interrupted Fargo’s nap, who interrupted Cindy’s.

  “What’s up?” She yawned.

  I told her of the earlier activities and my brief conversation with Spitz.

  “Damn!” She reached in my shirt pocket for her monthly cigarette. I admired and disliked her self-control. “Well, do you want me to go call Peter? Funny, he gave me his card last night. Maybe he also reads tea leaves.”

  “Don’t call him yet. Let’s see what our Jeffie pulls next. Spitz apparently expects him soon.”

  The sheriff arrived a little before noon, waving two warrants. One for the house and grounds, one for my car.

  I suppose the search made some kind of sense as a precaution, but not much else. If Jeffie knew Mickey’s head had been hit with a rock, presumably he had the rock. Was he expecting to find blood-stained clothing? We’d had all night to weight it down and take it up to the “bottomless” tarn. Obviously his wallet had been found intact, and apparently his face had not been disfigured in some effort to prevent identification. So he would not find a bloody hammer in the mudroom.

  Surely he did not expect to find a half-written letter: “And so, Mom, we’ll be home as soon as we kill Mickey.” Perhaps he deduced that one of us kept a diary and had made some guilt-ridden or triumphant entry.

  Johnson and Spitz came inside, two other deputies started on the car. Cindy supervised the car search, while I went upstairs to oversee Johnson and the obviously nervous Spitz. They found literally nothing in the guest room except linens and soap in a small cabinet and extra blankets in the closet.

  The kids’ rooms held a few games and books, some odds and ends of clothing and the ubiquitous linens. I followed them downstairs to see Cindy climbing the deck stairs. The car apparently had yielded nothing of interest. The deputies, she said, had moved on to the yard.

  In the living room, Jeffie had ordered Dave to take the half-burned logs from the cold fireplace and out to the deck. Meantime he scraped around the ashes, scattering soot over himself and a large portion of the carpet. Cindy came in and immediately lost her temper.

  “What the hell are you doing, you oaf! You’re ruining the carpet! By God, you’ll get the cleaning bill. What are you looking for? The plans for a nuclear bomb?”

  “There might have been burnt clothes. It’ll probably vacuum clean.”

  “It will require professional cleaning,” Cindy was now all sweetness. “Mr. Willingham will love to hear that.” Johnson looked slightly uneasy.

  Spitz came in, holding his blackened hands before him like a gift.

  “Go wash them in the mudroom,” I ordered, “before you touch anything! You, too, Sheriff.” He gave me a dirty look, but complied.

  They returned marginally cleaner and looked around the rest of the living room. All the pillows were carefully shaken and felt, and Cindy and I exchanged a fast look. Johnson discovered a stack of household bills in a table drawer and went over them in detail.

  “Mr. Willingham will be thrilled that you took such an interest in his personal business,” Cindy gushed. She was on a roll, and I didn’t envy the sheriff.

  “McCurry could have been blackmailing him,” Johnson pointed out.

  “And sent him a monthly bill which he filed along with the gas and electric companies’?”

  Spitz gave the bookcase a fast once-over. Finding no secret panels, he announced he was moving on to the kitchen. I heard a drawer or two open and close, a cabinet door click shut and the squeaky oven door come open for a fast look-see. And the heartfelt kitchen search was ended. I heard his footsteps come out of the mudroom as we trailed Johnson into the master bedroom. I was last in the line of three, and Spitz crooked his finger at me in a come-here motion.

  I quietly joined him in the mudroom, where he stood staring at the three guns.

  “What’s this armory all about?” he asked softly. “Is there ammo for them?”

  “They were here when we got here. I assume they are Ken’s. None of them had been fired or cleaned in a hundred years. None of them are loaded, but ammo is in that drawer. Take a look at the .22—it’s more a danger to the shooter than his target.”

  He gently lifted the rifle from its pegs and turned it toward the window. Pulling back the bolt, he grimaced. “Jesus, what a mess.”

  “The shotgun is the same and so was the pistol.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes, I cleaned and loaded it a couple of days ago, just for general safety—two women alone, a rather isolated cabin, unfamiliar territory. It has not been fired, nor would it have been without extreme provocation and immediate threat.”

  “You sound like a cop.”

  “I’m a licensed PI, my brother is the cop.”

  He stifled a guffaw, pulled the pistol from the holster, smelled it and looked it over carefully. Returning it to the holster, he reached as high as he could and placed it and its box of cartridges atop a bare rafter. They were out of sight from floor level, but where it had hung, there was a light spot on the wall. I looked around and took a full length apron from a wall hook—Mrs. Fouts’?—and hung it on the nail that had held the holster.

  We looked at each other, smiled slightly and returned to the kitchen in time to hear Cindy yell, “You bastard!”

  Dave Spitz ran for the bedroom, with Fargo and me hard on his heels. His broad shoulders blocked my view, but, looking around his arm, I glimpsed Sheriff Jeffie Johnson holding a brief, diaphanous, lace-trimmed black nightgown against his corpulent body and seemingly doing a little dance step.

  “What happened?” I ducked under Dave’s arm and yanked the gown from Johnson’s unresisting grip.

  Cindy was red with rage. She pointed to Johnson. “This dirty-minded pervert of a law officer held this gown of Frances’s up to his body and did his elephantine dance with it while he asked me if it is what I wear when you and I go to bed.”

  “Jesus, Jeffie! What the hell were you thinking?” Dave looked mortified.

  “Hey, folks, I was just kidding around. I didn’t mean nothing.”

  “Did he touch you?” I’d kill him!

  “No.”

  “Even so…I imagine you report to the town council?” Spitz nodded for the frozen Jeffie.

&
nbsp; “Good.” I tossed the gown back in the bureau and slammed the drawer. “I imagine they will be almost as interested as Mr. Willingham to learn you were cavorting with his wife’s lingerie and asking their cousin what she wears to bed at night!”

  “I still don’t see why y’all are makin’ such a fuss…”

  A deputy interrupted Jeffie by marching past us and dumping three river rocks on the bed.

  “Look what, I found on the back porch, Sheriff.”

  They were three of my four bookends-to-be. “There should be a fourth, Deputy. Why didn’t you bring that one in? It’s right beside the others,” I explained.

  “There wasn’t no fourth. Just these three lined up along the edge of the back porch.”

  “Oh, shit,” I sighed.

  Jeffie laughed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  We all trailed the sheriff down to his car, where he still had the fourth rock in a plastic bag in the trunk. It seemed a rather carefree way to handle evidence in a murder investigation.

  He handed me the bag and I looked thoroughly at the rock, trying not to see the caked blood and little gobs of hair caught in the rough, almost flat underside of the rock I had once thought so pretty. It was brown with an orange cast and a couple of yellowish areas I had found interesting.

  “Well,” I said, handing the bag back to him. “It could be mine or one very much like it.”

  “So you admit it is yours.”

  “No, Sheriff, I admit the possibility. And even if it is mine, it was kept on the back porch with three others in plain view, as your deputy can verify. Anyone on the path—or even the mountain road—could have noticed it and picked it up.”

  “And I can tell you,” Cindy added, now demure and helpful, “you’ll find Ms.Peres’ fingerprints on it, probably mine and Mr. Mellon’s from the next cabin up. He noticed it and asked to look at it. And, of course, if you are lucky, you may find the prints of the killer.”

  “Mellon was the one who found McCurry. He walked down early to the mailboxes to get his Sunday papers from his mailbox and saw the body. He’s the one who called it in. He thought McCurry, maybe with some drinks in him, had fallen off the bridge. Mellon said a fellow did fall there, some years ago, and landed on his head…but he lived. Loony, but alive.” Dave seemed happy to provide this information, and Jeffie not pleased to hear it.

  “Perhaps McCurry would have survived if he’d been found sooner, the night was pretty cold,” I put in. It was a weak effort, but any red herring in a storm, I always say.

  “That doesn’t explain your rock being the weapon.”

  I propped my foot casually onto the car’s bumper and lit a cigarette, willing myself to look like a good ol’ mountaineer. “Well,” I drawled, “maybe it’s not my rock at all. Maybe somebody saw mine and liked it and just helped themselves to it. It could be in California by now. Maybe the one Mickey landed on was just coincidentally similar to mine.”

  “And maybe not. Law of averages makes it mighty strange you find one unusual rock somewhere in the creek and then another one just like it turns up right where Mickey’s head landed…if he did fall.”

  “If we hypothesize that it was my rock, it still makes no sense, Sheriff. There are probably dozens of rocks within reach of where he died. Why would I carry that one, which might be identified as possibly mine, down the hill? Why not just use one that came easily to hand?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it was symbolic or something.” He smirked.

  “Another question for you, Sheriff. What are those little scratches on the rock? They were not there when I picked mine up last week. They look like tiny little thumbtack scratches.”

  “I don’t know myself. They were there when we first saw it. I was hoping you could tell us what they were.”

  I shook my head and shrugged. “No. I’ve no idea. But it leads me to think that it is definitely not my rock at all. I most certainly would not have picked up one that was already marred. As I told you, we were going to use them in the house as bookends. These marks, of course, ruin it, and prove that either it was never mine, or someone had it after I did.”

  “Sheriff,” Dave Spitz added, “Mr. and Mrs. Mellon did have guests last night. Maybe McCurry was coming up the trail as they were coming down and he made a drunken remark to one of the women and her husband objected and they fought. The husband was losing, so one of his friends picked up the rock and hit Mickey in the back of the head, just meaning to stun. And they took him down to the bridge where he was likely to be seen. We’ll have to interview Mellon and his guests before we start coming to conclusions.”

  Johnson tightened his lips and shook his head. “Oh, we will do that, Dave, and we both know not a thing will come of it.”

  I believe that was the first thing I had ever heard our Jeffie say that I heartily agreed with.

  “Dave.” I leaned against the windowsill. “Did you say he was hit in the back of the head? I thought it was the top.”

  “It was the back, but almost to the top—kind of where the crown of your hair grows. Why?”

  “Wouldn’t that lead you to think the assailant was shorter than Mickey? The short killer would have been swinging his arm and reaching up. If he were as tall or taller than Mickey, he would have lifted his arm and brought the rock down on top of Mickey’s head. Yes?”

  Dave looked thoughtful, as if he were trying to visualize the attack. “I see what you mean. I’d have to check it out.”

  Johnson sighed. “If we’re goin’ to spend the day with ‘what-if’s’ and ‘ain’t it possibles,’ let’s go sit down. These shoes are murder.” He laughed at his accidental humor. I uncrossed my feet and took a step toward the kitchen, when he held out his hand to stop me. “Now Ms. Peres, I bet those sneakers are comfortable. Would they maybe be Champion brand, the ones with the funny tread design?”

  “They are Champions. I don’t know that the tread is unusual.”

  “Oh, it is, it is. We’ve got some pictures and a cast of a shoe just like yours, even down to the size, I think, and the photos were taken right up where McCurry’s body lay. I’m going to ask you to let me borrow them, ma’am. What shoes would you like Dave to get out of your suitcase in the car?” Sugar wouldn’t melt in the bastard’s mouth, now that things were going his way.

  “And that print, if it is from my shoe, could have been made any time in the last week. Get my loafers, please, Dave.” I kicked off my sneakers and left them in the middle of the floor for Jeffie to pick up, and padded into the kitchen,where Cindy had started another pot of coffee. I could have used something stronger, but not now. I needed all the wits I could muster.

  For example, Johnson had said up near Mickey’s body. And the deputies had earlier gotten all excited about something they found up the trail. Yet the body had presumably been found down near the main road. Were they confused? Were they not telling us something? Were they trying to get us confused? They had certainly succeeded, but I was damned if I would ask.

  While Cindy poured us all coffee, Jeffie thought he’d found a gold mine with the guns in the mudroom. Dave didn’t even get up, he just called. “Break that shotgun and look down the barrel…and the .22 is worse.”

  Johnson came back and took a chair. “It’s a shame to let weapons get in that shape.”

  “Yes, it is.” I thought to establish a bit of rapport. “It’s a good shotgun, and the pump-action .22 is antique—probably a 1912 model.”

  “You know your guns.” Jeffie looked interested. “You own any?”

  “Several handguns,” I smiled. “All in my safe at home. If I go skeet shooting, which is rare, I borrow my brother’s shotgun.”

  While Jeffie was still pondering my collection, Dave informed him why I had it. “Ms. Peres is a licensed private investigator, Jeffie, and her brother is a cop.”

  Jeffie tried hard to look cordially interested, while I would have bet he was regretting some of his morning’s actions that weren’t exactly according to the Police Officer�
�s Handbook.

  But I had to give him credit: he was clumsy, he was also tenacious.

  “Ladies, I would like to get your fingerprints, just for elimination purposes, on those three river rocks. Our killer may have hefted them all before he made a choice, and hopefully he didn’t wear gloves.”

  “Don’t forget, your deputy handled them all,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, I won’t forget.” His smile was sour. “And neither will he.” He raised his voice. “Bailey! Get the fingerprint kit out of my car and bring it in. And when you finish with the two ladies, remember to take your own.”

  “Take my own?” The man looked confused, and then the light dawned. “Oh, yeah. Gosh, Sheriff, I’m sorry.”

  “Now there you got it right. You are sorry. I guess now I’m goin’ to have to try to find Sayles and Emory. I know it takes some time to cover twenty acres of property, but they been gone long enough to have a picnic and a nap. I thank you for the coffee, Miss.” He was back to the Policeman’s Handbook.

  As he began to shuffle his obviously still hurting feet toward the back door, he was hailed through the kitchen window.

  “Sheriff, can you please come out here? We don’t want to bring this mess into the house.” The missing officers were heard from.

  “Stay right there!” Johnson bellowed, with a sideways glance at Cindy. “I’m on my way.”

  His curiosity put a little speed in his step, and his face held a satisfied expression. What did he think they had found? Surely not another body! A cold fire with scraps of burned clothing? I hoped so: any police lab would prove in a hurry they were not Cindy’s or mine.

  The sheriff’s minions had all followed him out. Cindy and I looked at each other, shrugged and mentally agreed we had as much—more—right in the backyard than anyone else, so out we went.

  The two deputies were truly a sight to behold: they were nearly covered in mud for a base coat, sprinkled liberally with what looked like sawdust and dotted artistically with last winter’s leaves. They looked as if they had posed for some surrealistic Jackson Pollack painting, and their associates were enjoying one of those particularly satisfying laughs that say. “Better you than me, buddy!”