Ed Lynskey - Isabel and Alma Trumbo 02 - The Cashmere Shroud

by Ed Lynskey

  “That’s what makes us so interesting,” said Alma.

  Isabel smiled in sympathy. “We can’t be blamed for getting into these jams. Believe it or not, we go to extraordinary lengths to avoid getting involved, but it runs counter to our nature. We must’ve been born to be Nosey Grandma Parkers butting into others’ business.”

  “I see.” Dwight stopped massaging his temples. “Don’t doctors prescribe anti-snooping meds to manage your, uh, condition?”

  “They’d be of little benefit,” said Alma. “Only an Act of Congress will make Isabel take her allergy pills.”

  “My allergy is much improved,” said Isabel, sniffing.

  “Might either of you carry any spare aspirins in your pocketbook?” asked Dwight. “I can feel a migraine is seconds away from hitting me.”

  Alma leaned forward and poked Dwight in the forearm. “When it rains it pours, and you’re our handy umbrella.”

  “It’s nice to feel needed,” he said. “This marks the first time I’ve been compared to an umbrella of all things.”

  “Enough dithering,” said Alma. “Roscoe Fox is giving us a lot of trouble over our helping Sammi Jo.”

  Dwight tilted his eyes upward to regard the stucco ceiling. He imagined how nice it would look if he painted it gentian blue. Right now he’d better get rid of his prickliest clients. “Sheriff Fox is perfectly within his legal rights to do that since you should not be interfering with his police work. I’ve talked myself blue in the face lecturing you on that concept.”

  “Roscoe is taking the easy way out again by railroading Sammi Jo into a murder charge,” said Alma.

  “How might you know that for a concrete fact?” asked Dwight. “Did he expressly tell you he’s set to arrest her?”

  “We’re no spring chickens, Dwight, but we’re not going senile either,” replied Alma. “History repeats itself. He pulled the same chicanery on Megan after Jake was murdered. It hasn’t slipped your mind what a quagmire that turned into for us.”

  “The nightmares from it still wake me up shaking like a leaf and in cold sweats,” said Dwight.

  “Then you better get behind us to prevent it from happening again,” said Alma.

  Dwight narrowed his eyes into studious squints as if peering into a laptop screen at Isabel, the sensible one. “Is the status quo nearly dire as Alma likes to portray it?”

  “She’s never fibbed to you, Dwight. You can take everything she’s just told you as the gospel truth.”

  “Well, until Sammi Jo is charged with a specific crime, I can do little for her,” he said. “My most prudent counsel is to wait and see what unfolds.”

  Alma wasn’t receptive to accepting that trite advice. “Nice try, Dwight. But we’ve hired you to fulfill your role in our finding Ray Burl’s killer.”

  “Mother implored me to go into medicine,” said Dwight. “But I was too rock-headed, and I knew better than she did. So I became an attorney. Now look where it’s gotten me. Things are a big mess. All right then, Isabel and Alma, I’ll play along with you, but I have one unshakeable caveat. I refuse to do anything that is regarded unlawful or unethical. I have to be able to sleep at nights.”

  “Just leave the dirty work to us,” said Alma. “We’re a pair of old, kindly grandmas no jury in the land will convict and send to prison.”

  Dwight knew that was a popular myth, but he didn’t share that insight only because he didn’t want to deal with the sisters any longer than he had to.

  “I’ll write you a check, Dwight,” said Isabel, reaching inside her pocketbook for the checkbook. “How much is your retainer?”

  “Money isn’t a priority right at the moment,” said Dwight. “We’ll settle that while at the office. Will that be all, ladies?”

  “One more action item,” replied Alma. “Get a haircut at Marvin’s Barbershop in case we need to appear before the bench. I’m not letting Tommy Chong represent us so we can get cited for a contempt of court.”

  “Again, that’s part of my new manly fashion statement,” said Dwight.

  Isabel nudged Alma for them to make a graceful departure before she made a regrettable comment on Dwight’s misguided manly fashion statement.

  Chapter 15

  Riding home after their confab with Dwight, Isabel, their driver, was mulling over how irascible Alma had turned since Sheriff Fox had visited them. She wasn’t at her sharpest when her mercurial nature governed her actions, which sometimes bordered on impulsive and ill-advised. Isabel weighed if she should caution Alma against going off half-cocked, but Alma was already aware.

  “The plot thickens,” she said. “We better stay on guard, above all me.”

  “Sterling advice.” Isabel noticed how the friskier breeze had turned the oak leaves inside out, exposing their paler undersides. That was a weather sign of rain in the offing, but she’d believe it only when she felt the first drops spattering on her upturned face.

  Alma fussed inside her pocketbook but not for her keys. “I’m sure I bought a roll of peppermint LifeSavers when we last shopped at the IGA.”

  “There’s a six-pack in the kitchen’s penny candy jar,” said Isabel.

  “They must be what I remember getting.” Alma ceased her pawing. “Here’s a question for you. Do you get the sense Sheriff Fox is bluffing us?”

  “About his charging Sammi Jo with Ray Burl’s murder?” Isabel paused to deliberate. “Maybe, but if he is, why do we draw so much of his concern?”

  “He likes to call it our ‘meddling’ in his police affairs.”

  “We’ve been known to do a bit of that from time to time.”

  As they made the turn on Church Street, Alma shifted her pocketbook in her lap. “If he’s just stirring up a big smokescreen, we should be asking what he’s actually got up his sleeve.”

  Isabel laughed. “Oh come on, Alma. Listen to us prattle on like this. You give him too much credit because he’s not that brainy or sneaky. This is Roscoe Fox we’re talking about, not Steve McGarrett or Theo Kojak.”

  Alma smiled at the references to their past favorite TV cop shows. “But is Roscoe taking a different tack on us? Something we haven’t thought of to predict?”

  “He’s all bluster and bark to conceal his deepening frustrations over not getting any positive results. That’s why he refuses to take his crosshairs off Sammy Jo.”

  Alma nodded. She saw their neighbor lady, Mrs. Agnes Ruby Stringfellow, had painted her wraparound porch the shade of robin’s egg blue. Agnes Ruby was a widow like Isabel who ran the Senior Folks’ Center located only a block up and over from their brick rambler. Agnes Ruby rode choppers into her late 70s, smoked stinky cigars, and could cuss the ears off a rap idol. She was also trying to lobby them to drop by some afternoon and join their guilty pleasures such as leathercrafts, basket weaving, and, most exciting of all, playing Parcheesi or Chinese checkers.

  Well. Alma had informed Agnes Ruby in no uncertain terms the sisters played one, and only one, game: Scrabble. If the Senior Folks’ Center should ever adopt it as one of the guilty pleasures, they’d check into participating. But until such time, Agnes Ruby could go blow smoke rings from her Harley before she’d ever see Isabel or Alma at the Senior Folks’ Center. Basket weaving, Alma had fumed while hanging up the phone. The lady was “tetched in the head,” as their father Woodrow used to mutter behind their mother Gwendolyn’s back.

  Isabel now parked in the driveway. Pie-crust brown grasshoppers, energized by the August heat wave, were jumping over the lawn. As girls, they used to chase them down to catch and use as bait to fish in the Coronet River. In similar fashion, she’d love to identify something they could offer as bait to entice out Ray Burl’s killer.

  The far-fetched idea was lifted straight out of the plot to a Golden Age mystery novel. Isabel didn’t put much stock in such a ruse’s value in the twenty-first century. Today’s killers were too sophisticated and guileful to trip up and stumble into such a simple trap laid for them.

  “Why don’t w
e in a bit take a spin out to the turf farm?” asked Alma. “We’ll go see with our own eyes where it all went down.”

  Isabel looked to Alma. “This being a Saturday, I doubt if it’s open.”

  “Do the customers not come in on Saturdays?”

  “Ray Burl the foreman was probably there for the Saturday hours, but Mr. Barclay won’t have found a suitable replacement this soon.” Isabel undid her lap-and-shoulder belt. “But you’ve got me curious enough to go and personally see the layout.”

  “Inside it should be cooler.” Alma also unbuckled her lap-and-shoulder belt. “I feel like a baked yam sitting out here under the sun.”

  ***

  Pooped out in her apartment over the drugstore, Sammi Jo felt torn over whether to phone Reynolds and beg off from their date. Not that they’d made any grandiose plans beyond chowing down at Eddy’s Deli, or if they could ignore their growling stomachs, going all in and driving the seven miles north to Warrenton, the closest town of any larger size.

  Once there, they’d enjoy their pick of any fast food chain restaurant on the west bypass. His favorite was a Greek pizzeria while she was more taken with the pancake house unless it was Sunday morning when she went for the delicious brunch served at a steakhouse.

  When her cell phone inside the carrying case she clipped to her waistband rang, she found her caller was Alma.

  Sammi Jo was hip to their proposal to canvass the turf farm. Reynolds could always hang around the drugstore downstairs chatting with Eustis, slurping down a root beer float at the soda fountain, or reading the latest comic books if she wasn’t back in time.

  She felt relieved their relationship hadn’t progressed to where they felt comfortable enough to exchange door keys. She doubted if they’d get that serious. Reynolds was a fun dude to pal around with, but did he measure up as husband material? Were kids, SUVs, and a home mortgage part of his foreseeable plans? Did his quest for speed found at the drag race track keep him amused enough? If he proposed to her, she’d feel obligated to ask the diamond ring’s karat size he’d selected. Then she’d give it the sparkles-on-the–wiggled-finger test.

  She sighed out loud. Quiet Anchorage didn’t offer a young single lady a pool of eligible, much less desirable, bachelors to romance, marry, and grow old together with. Although Isabel had married the local boy Max, Alma had moved away before she got hitched twice. Sammi Jo might have to follow in Alma’s footsteps. On the other hand, new folks were relocating to these parts all the time. Sammi Jo might expand her vision beyond her circle of friends and meet a new guy who’d sweep her off her feet, which allegedly occurred once in a girl’s lifetime. Thinking of that heartened her spirits. Right now it was back to work. She put aside her love life and donned her deerstalker hat.

  She owned the brand of answering machines that recorded her telephone conversations, and she’d accidentally taped a call she’d had with Ray Burl. She remembered the recording, found it, and replayed it, her ears sharp to catch any clues Ray Burl may’ve dropped while he spoke. She’d phoned him during their murder investigation of Jake Robbins.

  Clarence Fishback, one of Roscoe Fox’s backstabbing deputy sheriffs no longer on the scene, was mentioned. Sammi Jo activated the recording and let it run as she stood over the answering machine, listening up. She’d caught him on a rare day when he’d felt loquacious: he’d probably never held a longer conversation with her.

  “Hi, Daddy, just me here saying hey there.”

  “Sammi Jo? What’s the time?”

  Her pulse quickened at the cadence of his familiar twangy drawl.

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “So it is. Don’t you need to be at work?”

  “Well, that’s why I called. See, I landed this new gig.”

  An exaggerated moan came from him. “What’s the job this time?”

  “Before I say, promise you won’t blow your stack.”

  He laughed. “After all this, nothing you can throw at me is a shocker.”

  “I’ve taken up the private detective trade. Isabel and Alma Trumbo started a new firm, and they asked me to come and work for them.”

  He laughed again using his gruff charm that was there when he needed it to be. “The gumshoes in the old movies are an odd bunch.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Any honest labor tied to a steady paycheck is cool by me. I didn’t realize we’d a demand for private eyes in town. Are they bonded and licensed?”

  “Not yet but it’s in the works. We’re still setting up shop, and Megan Connors is our first big case.”

  Ray Burl scoffed. “I can flat-out say she is no killer.”

  “Same thought here. Any theories on who pulled the trigger?”

  “I’ve been too busy to give it much thought. Jake didn’t go out of way to pick fights. He kept to himself and fixed the cars. His daddy Hiram and I were road dogs back in the day. Now, Hiram had an Irishman’s temper, and I’d lay betting odds Jake also kept one buried deep inside of him.”

  “Clarence and Jake were pals who fought over their race car.”

  This time Ray Burl grunted. “Even so, Clarence lacked the grit to take out a gun and use it on Jake.”

  “Crazy Willie swears a UFO did in Jake.”

  Ray Burl used a dry chuckle. “True story. Ages ago on a whim, he rode the Greyhound to a convention held in Roswell and got hooked on reading the spooky science fiction stuff.”

  “That accounts for his bizarre slant on life.”

  “That’s just his shtick. Crazy like a fox, Willie is perceptive if you’re able to look beyond his goofiness.”

  “So, do you think this PI job can pay the bills?”

  “Sure. Go kick some major butt for Megan.”

  “Your vote of confidence is appreciated. How’s the turf farm treating you?”

  Sammi Jo listened closer for any clue about the place where he was found murdered.

  “My crew humped under the floodlights until midnight. An eighteen-hole golf course in Gainesville needed a rush, and we made schedule.”

  “Now I know where I got my working fool genes. Well, I better also make some money. It’s been swell talking to you,” Sammi Jo had said to close out their phone communication.

  She was now left shaking her head before the recording had completed its replay. His murder the previous Thursday had wrecked her young heart. Nothing in their exchange offered her any new insight as to who might’ve harbored a serious grievance against him. She’d run smack-dab into another stone wall. His twangy drawl almost speaking to her from beyond the grave was eerie to the point of creepy, and it unnerved her.

  Her first impulse to erase—her finger rested on the answering machine’s button—his words preserved on the tape wasn’t a strong enough one, and she spared their recording. Her finger lifted off the button. Later, Isabel and Alma might want to give it a close listen and see if they picked up on anything Sammi Jo had overlooked. If they also contracted a case of the heebie jeebies like the one perturbing her, then she’d destroy the recording.

  Chapter 16

  Ambrose Barclay had gone into the turf farm business after growing up on his father’s dairy farm. Their cows got milked twice a day, early morning and late afternoon, 365 days a year. Barclay grew bone-weary of the incessant chore. After his father drowned atop a silo filled with shelled corn that sucked him down and suffocated him like quicksand, the farm went to Ambrose.

  He married the shiniest apple of his eye, Elsie Denise China, who managed the volunteers at the hospital ladies’ auxiliary. The Barclays adopted a young boy, Alexandru, from Romania and a younger girl, Biyu, from China. Without a shred of guilt, Mr. Barclay sold off the dairy herd and planted the farm’s flat terrain in commercial sod. The townies leered and snickered behind his back at his folly, but he’d done his homework and figured out how to turn a buck. In time, he promoted his hardest worker Ray Burl Garner to be the foreman.

  “Mr. Barclay was over the moon on how Daddy ran the turf far
m,” said Sammi Jo from the rear seat. Isabel was at the helm. They’d just cleared the Farmers Co-op on Main Street, which appeared busy as it always did. “He was Mr. Barclay’s golden goose, and he knew it.”

  “Is it your contention Mr. Barclay had no apparent motive to see your father dead?” asked Alma, up front with Isabel.

  “Not if Mr. Barclay is all about raking in the profits as I’d say he is from what Daddy told me,” replied Sammi Jo.

  “Did he get along with his boss?” asked Alma.

  Isabel took the question. “She already answered that, Alma.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Alma. “Ill feelings between employer and employee can still breed even if the money is flowing in like it was there. Sammi Jo?”

  “Daddy never had anything negative to say about Mr. Barclay,” she replied. “As long as there was plenty of work to be done, Daddy was a happy man.”

  “Sis, are you cool enough?” asked Alma.

  “I’m comfortable, thanks,” replied Isabel. “Turn off the air conditioner if your nose is turning into an icicle.”

  Alma sought to make it a majority. “Sammi Jo, how do you want to cast your vote? Should the A/C be left on or turned off?”

  Several car lengths of silence ensued, and when Alma turned around in the front seat to see what the matter was, she confronted something stunning. Her mouth dropped, but no words expressed her instant sympathetic reaction. Fat tears trickled down Sammi Jo’s cheeks despite her visible effort to strain and hold it together. Her chin quivered, and her bottom lip protruded.

  She swiped her fingers to scrape away the tears, but new ones welling up in her eyes replaced them. She had the poise to give Alma the sh-h-h gesture with her index finger put to her pursed lips. Sammi Jo didn’t want Isabel to know, but Isabel had glimpsed Sammi Jo crying in the rearview mirror.

  “Are you wrestling with a bout of the blues, dear?” asked Isabel.

  Sammi Jo did the finger swipe again, allowing her extra time to compose herself. “Before you came, I played an old recorded phone conversation between Daddy and me on my answering machine. I hoped to discover something he said that might be of use to us, but I was too optimistic. We just talked, and the sound of his recorded voice resonated louder in me just now. Give me a minute, and I’ll be back on the beam with you.”