Death Dangles a Participle (Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series)

by E. E. Kennedy

  “Why don’t the boys come out themselves?”

  “What does their lawyer have to say about this?”

  “Don’t they know they could have hurt someone?”

  “Are they guilty?”

  “Did they kill that man?”

  Martin took a deep, weary breath and held up his hand. “Alls I can say is that they’re sorry. We’re all sorry. They’re kids. They did something stupid. That’s all. If you want to know anything more, talk to Mr. Cobb.” He turned and began to move back through the crowd to his front door, his shoulders drooping, ignoring the roar of questions that followed him.

  The news anchor said, “And here’s the comment from the attorney for the young men.”

  In contrast to Martin Rousseau, James Cobb cut an impressive, handsome figure as he stood on a step outside his office building, slightly elevated above the crowd of reporters. “What happened today is simply an example of what stress and mistreatment can do the minds of impressionable young people, hounded beyond description by a corrupt establishment and a brutal police department. Once we are in the courtroom, we will prove the baselessness of these charges, and once they are exonerated, I will advise Dustin and John Rousseau to begin a lawsuit for false arrest and malicious prosecution against those responsible for this outrage.”

  One of the reporters shouted a question, “Isn’t there a witness?”

  “We intend to prove that that so-called witness is mentally unbal—”

  “I can’t listen to any more,” Marie said, using the remote to turn off the television.

  I sat down. “That was J.T. on the roof. I recognized him. What was he thinking?”

  Bert poured coffee into his thermos. “Like Martin said, he’s a kid.” He shrugged. “They don’t think.”

  “That’s a copout, dear,” Hester said. She hastened to add milk to his thermos.

  Etienne began to pull on his coat. “No, it’s not. When you’re young, you do all sorts of silly things.” He had a melancholy look on his face, and I suspected that he was thinking of his daughter and the well-meant foolishness that had led to her death last year. Or was he remembering some long-ago indiscretion in his own past?

  “I don’t care. No matter what that lawyer says, a stunt like that just makes the boys look guilty,” Marie said, hastily coming back to the subject at hand. “You can sort of see how they might kill a guy, maybe by accident or something, then panic.” She looked at me. “I know you really think they’re innocent, Amelia, but maybe you have to face facts. Just ’cause you want it to be, don’t make it true.”

  Her eyes held a hint of tears. Thoughts of her late daughter were never far from Marie’s mind, either.

  I nodded. There was nothing I could say. If someone like Marie could think the Rousseau boys would do such a thing, I dreaded to think what a jury might conclude.

  There was a knock at the back door. Etienne opened it to Chuck Nathan, bearing a handsome floral arrangement. Once again I was struck by his resemblance to one of those 60’s radicals: wild hair, scruffy clothing, and all. Yet it was ironically rumored that Chuck could, so to speak, buy and sell anyone in town, a direct result, one presumed, of his hard work and penurious ways.

  Our little group welcomed the diversion. Hester relieved Chuck of his burden and invited him to join us for coffee.

  He declined without any particular grace. “Nope. Can’t. Got lots of deliveries to make.” He looked over at Etienne. “Can I talk to you? About those ads on your fishing shanties?”

  Etienne’s face broke into a smile. “Of course! Come with me to the garage; I’ll show them to you.” He finished buttoning his overcoat and the two men left through the back door.

  “Ads on the shanties? That’s a new idea, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Bert shrugged. “That’s the Frenchman for ya. He’s always comin’ up with stuff like that. Hey, it’s a living. Take the fishing shanties, I mean, shelters—that’s what Etienne calls ’em. We got a waiting list now; people really want to rent ’em for the contest.”

  “Bert, do you consider the sporting goods stores as your competition? I mean with regard to the fishing—um, shelters?”

  Bert pulled on his gloves and watch cap. “Nah. There’s people that rent and there’s people that buy. Two different groups, you might say.”

  Marie held up a hand. “Wait. Everybody be quiet.”

  In the sudden silence, we could hear muffled voices, raised in anger.

  We all hastened to the back door and saw Chuck and Etienne in a nose-to-nose confrontation.

  “You can’t just pollute the scenic environment like that!” Chuck was shouting.

  The florist’s height made him somewhat imposing, but the smaller man was giving as good as he got.

  “Pollution, you say; what I say is the free enterprise!” Etienne roared, his index finger waggling in Chuck’s face.

  “Capitalist!”

  “Communist!”

  Muttering epithets, Nathan abruptly turned and stalked out of the yard, leaving his adversary standing there, panting.

  Without donning a coat, Marie scurried out into the yard and escorted—or rather, dragged—her husband inside. Etienne was muttering something in French.

  “Etienne!” Marie scolded, “Tais-toi!”

  Etienne kissed her forehead. “Sorry, chérie. Il est fou, ce type. He says my advertising will pollute the lake.

  “Pollute the lake?” Hester asked. “How’s it gonna do that?”

  “It’s like billboards, he says. It ruins the scenery, he says.” Etienne went to the coffeepot and began to pour himself another cup. His hand shook, and some of the coffee sloshed onto the counter. “What a dope.” It was hard to tell if he was referring to Chuck or himself. “Niaiseux.”

  “Sit down,” Marie ordered and hastened to take over for him. “Didn’t you tell him the shelters were temporary? Only there for a few weeks?”

  Etienne waved away Marie’s logic. “He knows. He don’t care. I am turning the lake into a junkyard, he says.” He took a big swig from the mug Marie set before him and set it down decisively. “Well, come on, Bert, let’s get busy. If we are making junk, we better make sure it’s good junk.”

  Bert grinned and pulled on his gloves. “Right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Miss Amelia,” Alec said breathlessly on my new cell phone’s voicemail after school the next day, “meet me at the diner, would ye please? Right away? It’s verry important!”

  I’d known who was calling. Alec had assigned himself a special ringtone. My tiny telephone had played a tinny version of “Bonnie Annie Laurie,” but it had rung in the middle of my two o’clock class. I’d retrieved the message at the end of the day.

  “Couldn’t you have told me over the telephone?” I said aloud. Even to myself, I sounded whiney, but I was bone-weary and eager to get home.

  He concluded the recorded message as if he’d heard me. “It’s too complex to discuss on the telephone. Please come, soon as ye can!”

  I hung up, groaning. I didn’t want to trudge through the snow-covered streets again. On the bright side, the diner was only two blocks away from Chez Prentice and made a widely renowned bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. A good excuse for a snack for little Cathy or Heathcliff. I bundled up, bid Marie goodbye and headed out.

  It was just four o’clock when I pushed through the door of the shiny silver diner. The smell of frying bacon made my mouth water. Danny Dinardi called out a greeting from the grill as I made my way down the aisle with counter and stools on one side and narrow booths on the other, most of which were empty.

  “You here to meet the professor?” he said, grinning. “He’s waiting.” Danny jerked his head toward a booth in the furthest back corner where Alec sat, trying to look casual.

  Only cowering under the table would have made him look more conspicuously secretive. As it was, he had slid all the way up against the wall, clutching an attaché case to his chest. There was an empty coff
ee cup before him on the table.

  “Stt!” He signaled me and gestured with a large, hairy hand, indicating I should sit opposite him. Alec furtively wedged the attaché between himself and the wall. “Amelia,” he began in a hoarse whisper, only to be interrupted by Shirley, Danny’s taciturn wife, who also happened to be his waitress.

  “Get ya anything?”

  Alec froze, his eyes darting back and forth.

  I couldn’t help myself. “BLT special and a large glass of milk, please.”

  Shirley noted my order on her pad and began to turn, but Alec stopped her in his melodious Scottish burr. “M’dear, would ye add to that order another one of those wonderful sandwiches,” he nodded at an empty plate before him, “and a warm up on m’coffee? Give me the check?”

  To my amazement, Shirley’s habitually sour expression melted into a wide smile. “Sure thing, Professor. Right away.”

  I leaned out of the booth, watching her walk away. “How did you do that?” I whispered.

  Alec dug in the attaché case. “Do what?”

  “Get a pleasant reaction out of that woman. I’ve never seen her smile in all the years I’ve been eating here.”

  Alec shrugged and placed a handful of papers on the table. “Oh, sure, she was a bit curdlin’ back when I first came in, but I dinna take the bait, so to speak. Just kept play actin’ as though we were fast friends, and soon enough, we were!”

  I leaned back into the aisle and spotted Shirley at another booth, her frown once again firmly fixed. “Oh, I don’t know. I think maybe it’s more than that.”

  Alec brushed aside my suggestion. “That’s neither here nor there, Amelia. Getting back to the real reason for my calling you—look!” He slid the papers across to me. “You told me that the bullet wasn’t found in the boys’ Volkswagen, rright?” His r’s rolled pleasantly as he tapped the top paper with a thick forefinger. “Look here.”

  I squinted at the page. It was a simple black and white sketch of a VW bug’s front seat interior. “Where did you get this, Alec?”

  Alec reached over and patted my hand. “I keep forgetting that you’ve only just joined the new century, m’dear. ’Tis simplicity itself with a search engine on the Internet. I found it on a website for Volkswagen enthusiasts and printed it out.”

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. Anyone who knew me at all well was aware that I did not own a computer. The first time I heard the term search engine, my overactive imagination conjured up the image of an eccentric, ornate Jules Verne-style contraption, a kind of snowplow derivative, equipped with a powerful headlight and perhaps a loudspeaker on the cab roof for good measure.

  To my word-obsessed mind, even the term website had a sinister sound. Where there was a web, could a spider be far away?

  Until I acquired my new cell phone, I’d managed to duck the pressure to conform to technological advances, even though Mr. Berghauser had gone so far as to give me an email address: ameliaprentice@yahoo.com. I’d ignored it. Frequent visits to Olive’s desk allowed me to obtain all the school information I needed to function, thank you very much. But there it remained, at the principal’s insistence.

  Alec leaned forward and pointed at the illustration. “This is the rather elderly model the Rousseau boys have, and ye can see the glove compartment there.”

  “Yes, of course, but what does this—”

  “Steady, lass, let me finish.” He pulled another sheet from underneath the first. “You’ll notice by this sketch that the back window of a Volkswagen is tiny by today’s standards. So the shooter had a very narrow range in which—”

  “The shooter?“

  Alec looked confused. “Yes, shooter. Isn’t that the correct term?”

  “You mean you believe the boys’ story?”

  “Of course, don’t you?”

  “I do believe that they didn’t kill anyone, but I thought perhaps the bullet-hole story was, well, a desperate attempt to validate themselves. It’s just so melodramatic.”

  “Think, Amelia. What’s more melodramatic than murder?”

  “Point taken. Go on.”

  “Well, if that part of the story was true, I think we can give more credence to the other part, as well.”

  “I don’t know, Alec. It just seems so fantastic. But,” I mused, “that lunchbox thing does contain what I guess to be stolen IDs.”

  “Right! It’s my contention that there was something illegal going on, and the boys stumbled onto it,” Alec said, then sat back, fixed a wide smile on his face and directed his gaze into the aisle. “Ah, here she comes now!”

  As Shirley Dinardi laid two heavy diner plates before us and removed the empty one, she positively simpered at Alec. Some kind of Scottish magic, I thought, and shrugged inwardly.

  The next few minutes were occupied with consuming Danny’s deservedly famous sandwiches, then Alec dabbed his lips and dusted off his gray-speckled beard with a paper napkin, signaling a resumption of our discussion. “What we need to do,” he whispered gruffly, because Shirley was taking an order in the next booth, “is somehow get into that car.”

  My mind was wandering. “What car?”

  Alec sighed. “Amelia, pay attention! The VW, of course! You know Dennis O’Brien quite well. Surely there’s a way.”

  I shook my head. “No, there isn’t. Last time I got Dennis involved in a problem of mine, I almost got him fired. I can’t impose on his friendship like that. But I suppose we could ask Mr. Cobb for help.”

  Alec smiled. “Of course! The defense attorney. Good thinking!” He dug in a side pocket of his attaché and produced a computer the size and thinness of a children’s picture book. “A gift to m’self. It’s already come in mighty handy,” he said in answer to my surprised expression. “Danny doesn’t have Wi-Fi, so I’ll have to use me modem.” He pulled a small rectangular item from his pocked and plugged it into the side of the computer.

  I had no idea what any of it meant, but within three minutes Alec had obtained the telephone number of Brand’s law firm and was poking it in to his cell phone, which he then unceremoniously handed over to me. “He knows you,” he mouthed at me.

  After some clumsy back-and-forth on my part and the admonition from the secretary that he could only spare a minute of his time, Cobb came on the line.

  “Yes, Mrs. Dickensen? What can I do for you?” His voice sounded impatient.

  “It’s about the boys’ car.”

  “The boys?”

  “Your clients? The Rousseaus? Their Volkswagen.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I can help you a little there. The father only wants a couple thousand for it. A steal, if you ask me. That thing’s a classic.”

  “Then the police have released it?”

  “Sure. They dropped it off in my parking lot. The father’s going to pick it up tonight sometime.”

  “Haven’t you looked it over? For evidence, I mean? That is, the boys said—”

  “Yes. Well.” Cobb allowed himself a small, derisive snort. “I’m framing the defense to go in a slightly different direction. These young men have been put through such trauma—”

  “You know, Mr. Cobb, I am interested in possibly buying that car, or at least I know someone who might be.”

  Gil liked classic cars. It was possible he’d like to buy one, I rationalized. Perhaps. Maybe.

  “Could I come see it this afternoon?”

  “Sure. Look, I’ve got to get to court. I’ll leave the key with my receptionist.”

  Alec drove, and we made it across town to the new office center in record time, as he hummed “Be Thou My Vision” under his breath.

  “There it is,” I said, pointing to the rather bedraggled little car, hunched in a far corner of the parking lot.

  Alec pulled in a slot next to it. “I’ll take a look at it while you fetch the key. Mr. Cobb might obtain a restraining order against me if I were to go up there.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Don’t ye remember? I’m a prosecution witn
ess, and—haven’t ye heard?—I’m to be portrayed as a maniac who sees mythical creatures. Perhaps I’m even dangerous. Have a care, Amelia.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me.

  I sighed. “What a mess!”

  “Ye’re right therre. Now run along! We’ve noo time to waste shilly-shallying!”

  “Who’s supposed to be the sidekick?” I muttered as I headed into the building.

  When I returned, Alec was sitting in the front passenger seat, running his hand around in the open glove compartment.

  “How did you get inside?”

  “I used the coat hanger that I carry in m’back seat for this very purpose. Simplicity itself.”

  “You? But—” I began, but stopped when Alec’s face lit up.

  “Amelia! I feel something! Let’s see. Ungh!”

  The professor seemed to be trying to cram his square, bulky body inside the compartment. All at once, he sprang back.

  “I was right! See for yourself. There’s a hole toward the back that you could put your fist through, and certainly a bullet! Try it yourself!” He backed out and hurried around to the front of the car, where he worried the trunk latch until it opened.

  Carefully I slid into the passenger seat, reached out and ran my fingers along the interior of the small box-like compartment. “Oh yes, here it is,” I said.

  My hand was smaller than Alec’s, and I was able to get it all the way through the hole to the trunk. I wiggled my hand and was startled to feel Alec’s calloused fingers in mine.

  “Oh!” I laughed and retracted my hand. “But Alec,” I asked, coming around the car to join him at the front, “what does this mean?”

  “It means, m’dear, that we might be able to prroove the boys are innocent.”

  “Oh, Alec, that’s wonderful! We need to call Dennis O’Brien right away!”

  “Hold your horses, Amelia, this is just part of the puzzle.” He was running his hand around the trunk. “It’s the bullet that’ll make the difference.” He grunted as he leaned over the edge and reach far into the interior, then backed out, clapping dust off his hands. “Nope, no luck.” He slammed the trunk shut. “No bullet. None.” He sighed, squinted and stared at the pavement. “A dead end.” Then his face brightened. “But we’re not defeated, are we? The good news is that the boys’ story is still possibly true. That’s something, at least.”