“Maybe Michael does.”
“I already asked,” she said. “He doesn’t. And we checked his personnel file to see who he put down to be notified in case of emergency. Apparently he listed his ex-girlfriend.”
“He might have filled it out before they broke up,” I suggested. “Doesn’t she know how to reach his family?”
“According to her, he called his mother from time to time, mostly when he needed money. But they never met, and she doesn’t have any contact information. At least it gives us a reason to keep a lid on things a little longer. He could have family, and we won’t want them to learn about his death from the news.” She returned to flipping through the pages of her notebook.
It occurred to me to sic my tech-savvy nephew Kevin on the search for Terence’s next of kin. I’d usually found that if Kevin couldn’t find a piece of information, it probably didn’t exist. Not online, anyway. But while I was trying to think how to phrase the suggestion without insulting the chief’s data-finding capabilities, she spoke up again.
“As long as you’re here, may I ask you a couple of questions?”
“Ask away. I already found what I wanted.” In fact, I’d already taken a picture of the Muddy Beggar’s employment form, rather than take the time to write down “Stanislaus We˛grzynkiewicz.”
“I’m told your grandfather made unspecified threats against the deceased,” she said.
“Unspecified threats?” I repeated. “Grandfather’s threats are usually pretty specific.”
“I’m sure,” the chief said. “But my interviewee didn’t remember them.”
“Then he or she wasn’t trying very hard,” I said. “Grandfather threatened to turn Terence into a toad.”
The chief frowned and blinked.
“Several times, if memory serves,” I added. “He was thinking of either a cane toad or a golden poison arrow frog. I can’t remember their Latin names, but I’m sure Grandfather can provide them if you think it’s apt to be relevant.”
“I can’t imagine how it would be.” The chief blew out her breath in a gesture of annoyance. “I assume this was in the context of the Game, as these actors like to call it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Grandfather’s eccentric, but rarely delusional. For some reason he’s really gotten into the Game.”
“He probably thought it would annoy your grandmother,” the chief suggested.
“Probably.” It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen much of Grandfather this morning. Maybe all the excitement had tired him out and he’d gone off to take a long nap. That would certainly make Cordelia’s day more pleasant. Still—I made a mental note to check on him. And then I focused back on the chief’s question. “I do hope you plan to tell Grandfather that you suspected him. He’ll get such a kick out of it.”
“Out of being suspected of murder?”
“Of a murder that, if I’m interpreting the evidence correctly, probably took considerable strength and dexterity. I know Dad would be delighted, and they can be very alike sometimes.”
“You’re probably right, so I won’t do any such thing.” She chuckled softly. “And if you tell him, I’ll deny that I ever suspected him. I was actually thinking more about the possibility that someone else might have acted on a threat he made.”
“You mean someone younger,” I suggested. “Someone more capable of sneaking out into the woods in the middle of the night and surprising or overpowering Terence?”
“Someone more unbalanced was my idea.”
I thought about it for a few moments, then shook my head.
“Seems farfetched,” I said. “I mean, yeah, if Grandfather had made a fiery public denunciation, calling Terence a climate change denier or an abuser of animals, maybe one of his more militant and fanatical followers might have gotten a crazy idea from it. But he hasn’t done any such thing, and even if he had, I can’t imagine anyone that militant showing up at something as frivolous as a Renaissance Faire. He wasn’t accusing Terence of environmental crimes. Just warning him to leave Dianne alone.”
The chief nodded and scribbled briefly in her notebook.
“I hope I didn’t just derail a promising theory,” I said.
“No, just helped me identify another probable red herring. Getting a few too many of those.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me who reported that Grandfather was making threats.”
“Not sure I should.” She studied my expression.
“Because you’re afraid I’ll retaliate against someone who tried to cause problems for Grandfather.” I nodded. “I get it.”
“Actually, I don’t think the person in question was trying to cause problems. They seemed genuinely worried that I might have heard about the so-called threats from someone else and taken them too seriously. They assured me repeatedly that your Grandfather was completely harmless and wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Not someone who knows him that well, then.” I thought over the various people she would have been interviewing. “Probably George Sims.”
“Any particular reason?” Her face was neutral, but there was a note of curiosity in her voice.
“Because it’s exactly the sort of silly thing he’d worry about,” I said. “Any kind of conflict or disagreement upsets him, and he’s always trying to explain away things that don’t need explaining—or can’t be explained away and are best left alone. Or calm people down about things they weren’t upset over in the first place.”
“He seems upset by Mr. Cox’s death,” the chief observed. “Genuinely so.”
“And uniquely so,” I added.
“Apparently. And I think it will come as quite a shock to him if we arrest anyone he knows for the crime,” she went on. “He went on at considerable length about how the Faire staff—particularly the performers—may have their little squabbles from time to time, but are all warm, wonderful people who are basically like a big happy family.”
Did George really think that? Or was his aversion to conflict so profound that he’d try to banish even the thought that someone he knew might not be all that warm and wonderful?
“Of course, at the moment I feel as if I was a fly on the wall during every minor disagreement that’s taken place over the last four weeks,” the chief said. “I wonder if he realizes how very much information he’s revealed about his warm, wonderful colleagues.”
“Maybe he does,” I said. “Maybe being the eternal optimist wears thin at times, and he gives in to the temptation to being just a little passive-aggressive.”
“Very likely,” she said. “No one’s that nice all the time. But then again—maybe he actually does suspect someone and doesn’t want to admit it to anyone—not even himself. Maybe that’s why he had to pour out all that detail about how people squabbled and made up, or played pranks on each other and were forgiven. Maybe he had to tell me about everybody so he could bring himself to tell me about somebody. But I have no idea who.”
She was staring at the opposite wall—at first, I thought she was staring at something and followed her gaze to see if I could figure out what so held her interest. But then I realized she was just staring into the distance while thinking.
“You know what’s odd about this case?” she said finally.
“A lot,” I said. “What in particular strikes you?”
“I actually met him yesterday. Mr. Cox. Less than twelve hours before he was murdered. Only briefly, but still—I met him.”
“Isn’t that kind of normal in a small town?” I asked. “Haven’t you met most of your murder victims?”
“You say that as if we get a lot of murders here in Riverton.” She chuckled. “Murder is very definitely not normal here—but when it does happen, I haven’t just met the victims. I’ve known them since grade school, and maybe even their parents and grandparents before them. And the same for whoever killed them. And if I don’t know right off the top of my head who’s the most likely one to have done it, it’d only be because the deceased was
more cantankerous than usual and had more than one person gunning for him. No, what I meant was that I’d met him—but just for a few minutes, and not under the best of circumstances. Not entirely sure I like that.”
“Why not?” Not, I assumed, a conflict of interest.
She thought for a moment.
“Curiously, my initial reaction was to think ‘well, at least the victim is someone I know.’ And that’s not the case at all, is it? I know a few of the things he did yesterday—sexually harassing a colleague, trying to undermine another colleague’s sobriety, and … well, I’m still not sure I understand how to describe whatever he did to get your friend Mr. Jackson fired, but I know it wasn’t a particularly kind thing to do. Not the way I’d like to spend my last day on Earth, but then I don’t suppose he was expecting to die today.”
“No,” I said. “He definitely wasn’t. He was expecting to leave Biscuit Mountain in a blaze of glory, having captured one of the leading roles in a well-publicized production at one of the country’s leading theaters. Maybe that was why he was so over-the-top yesterday. He was prone to mood swings. Getting the part probably sent him into orbit, and for some reason he wasn’t ready to share the news, so instead of bragging and gloating, he celebrated by being perfectly beastly to everyone around him.”
“Yes.” She nodded, still looking thoughtful. “Sounds in character. I know some of the things he did—more than I did at first, thanks to Mr. Sims—but I don’t really know him at all. I feel like I’m playing catch-up. Why those particular toads?”
“What?” The apparent non sequitur caught me off guard. “Oh, you mean Grandfather’s threat? No idea.”
“Are they both venomous? In which case his choosing those two could have been a subconscious judgment of Mr. Cox’s character.”
“Actually I don’t think either is venomous,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure they’re both poisonous.”
She blinked.
“There’s a difference?” She sounded puzzled.
“To a biologist like Grandfather, a big difference,” I explained. “Both produce a toxic substance, but a venomous creature actively injects it into you, while a poisonous one won’t harm you unless you’re misguided enough to bite into it.”
“So rattlesnakes and black widow spiders are venomous and mushrooms poisonous.” She seemed to be savoring the distinction. “Active versus passive. Fascinating.”
“Though not necessarily useful on your case,” I suggested.
“You never know,” she said. “Though it does rather torpedo my idea that your grandfather was making some kind of character assessment of Mr. Cox. Not that I like to speak ill of the dead, but I’d say he was venomous rather than poisonous.”
“I’d agree,” I said.
“And it does raise an interesting question about the crime,” she said. “Was the killer venomous or poisonous? Was it someone who actively sought out the opportunity to rid the world of Mr. Cox? Or someone who would never have done anything if Mr. Cox had not provoked them?”
“You’re thinking self-defense?” My voice probably telegraphed my skepticism.
“With a stab in the back?” She snorted. “Not hardly. No, more of a worm turning kind of thing. Mr. Cox pushes someone to the limit of his or her endurance, then turns his back, thinking himself perfectly safe with someone who isn’t very threatening to begin with, especially since they’re armed only with what amounts to a toy weapon. I notice Cordelia’s costume includes a wrist dagger that’s as elegant as it is lethal—not, I expect, a cheap import.”
“My work,” I said. “And thanks for the compliment.”
“Can you think of anyone whose costume generally includes a weapon? Someone who’s opted for the budget version?”
I thought for a moment and shook my head.
“Not offhand,” I said. “Not any of the main players in the Game, certainly—if they showed up with anything in their costume that was that … um…”
“Tacky?” the chief suggested.
“Well, I was thinking more of a word like ‘inauthentic,’” I said. “But you get the idea. If Dianne or George or Terence himself had wanted to wear a dagger as part of their costume and couldn’t afford a real piece, Faulk or I could have lent them one. But there are dozens of other people in costume. We don’t encourage them to wear weapons, but any of them could, as long as they’re peace-bonded. We could check the photos.”
“What photos?” The chief sounded very interested. “May I look at them?”
“The best of them are online, where the whole world can look at them,” I said. “On the Faire’s website. Cordelia has an arrangement with a couple of avid local teenage photographers that they get free admission if they let her display some of their work on the website. Plus we have a contest after every weekend for the best photos submitted by visitors. The winners get prizes, we showcase the honorable mentions—dozens of them—on the website, and we have God knows how many also-rans on file.”
“On file where? May I see them, too?”
“Let me ask my nephew Kevin.” I pulled out my phone.
“That’s the tech-savvy one?”
“Calling Kevin tech savvy is like calling the ocean damp.” I was typing out a message to Kevin as I spoke. “He runs the Faire’s website, and I’m telling him you want to see all the photos. Let me know if he doesn’t get back to you fairly soon with a link or a file or whatever. Sometimes when he’s working on a big project he goes incommunicado—in the tech world they call it going dark. But I can always send someone over to bother him in real life if it’s urgent.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t suppose Kevin has any programs that could sort through all those thousands of programs and flag any that happen to include cheap daggers?”
“I have no idea if such a thing exists, but if it does and Kevin doesn’t own it, he can track it down. We can but ask.” And while I was at it, I’d see if he had any idea how to find Terence’s next of kin. I typed a few more lines to Kevin, then turned back to the chief. “By the way, did I mention to you that we have Terence’s things?”
Chapter 27
“Things?” she repeated. “What things? If you mean his tent and its contents, I have them now. They’re locked in that room you were so obliging as to clear out. I plan to haul them down to the station house after closing time.”
“I mean the rest of his things. Remember my saying that just before he came up here his girlfriend kicked him out, so we didn’t really have a permanent address for him?”
She nodded.
“Well, since he had nowhere else to leave them, he brought all his worldly goods with him. He’s got twelve boxes stashed in Cordelia’s storage room. No idea what’s in them, much less whether any of it has anything to do with his murder. For all I know it could be nothing but scripts and programs from every play he’s ever been in plus a few hundred copies of his latest head shots. And I have no idea whether he’s ever asked for a key to the room so he could get at any of it, so it might be stuff he hasn’t touched in weeks.”
“But I should take a look.” The chief sighed. “It would be the equivalent of searching his house or apartment, if he had one.”
I rummaged in the key cabinet and entrusted the chief with a key to the storage room.
“Want me to show you which boxes are his?”
“First let me lock up this stuff in our temporary evidence locker. Any chance you could grab one box?”
I glanced at the boxes.
“Ooh,” I said. “Did you confiscate the Bonny Blade’s entire stock of daggers?”
“Pretty much.” She cocked her head to one side. “I gather you dislike the owners of the Bonny Blade. But why? And do you actually find them suspicious?”
“I don’t dislike them,” I protested.
“Could have fooled me. Somehow, whenever you talk about them, the word ‘cheap’ seems to come up. And that it’s clearly no compliment.”
“If they were here,” I said, �
�I’d be careful to say ‘inexpensive.’ And—” I stopped and did a bit of self-examination. How did I really feel about the two guys who ran the Bonny Blade?
“I don’t dislike them,” I said slowly. “What I dislike is the way so many people compare their prices with mine or Faulk’s and walk away thinking that we’re greedy price gougers. Or worse, come and tell us to our faces that we’re greedy price gougers. And that’s not the Bonny Blade’s fault. We no longer live in a society where most people walk around armed with swords and knives—and know that their safety and survival depends on the quality of those weapons. If we did, then people would figure out the reason for the difference in price. At least the ones who survive would.”
“Handmade versus machine-made.” The chief nodded as if that pegged it.
“No—good quality versus bad quality,” I countered. “There’s nothing inherently bad about machine-made and good about handmade. Some machine-made weapons are every bit as strong and resilient and well-balanced as the ones Faulk and I make—hell, maybe better. But they come with a roughly similar price tag. And there could be handmade weapons out there that aren’t even as good as the ones the Bonny Blade sells—because their makers are still learning the finer points of sword smithing. Or their makers don’t even want to bother with the finer points, because they’re satisfied with turning out inexpensive goods for the tourist trade. You could make the argument that paying for higher quality than you need is stupid anyway. Most of the people buying stuff from the Bonny Blade just want to take their new treasure home and hang it on the wall. Or maybe wear it as part of their costume to a Halloween party. The Bonny Blade’s stuff is fine for that.”
The chief seemed interested. I wasn’t sure what this had to do with the murder. Maybe nothing. Maybe she needed a mental break.
“So no, I don’t dislike the guys from the Bonny Blade,” I went on. “They’re filling a niche. Serving a useful purpose—if they weren’t at the Faire, we’d probably have to find another vendor who sells the same kind of stuff, because if Faulk and I were the only place you could buy weapons, the tourists in search of cheap knives and swords would drive us crazy. I do find it kind of annoying when the Bonny Blade guys do a sales pitch about how smart one of their customers is for shopping around to find the best bargains, with a couple of snide comments about swordsmiths who set their prices so high only kings and nobles can afford their blades. They don’t need to do that. But they’re not really doing any harm—anyone who falls for it isn’t going to buy from Faulk or me anyway.”
The Falcon Always Wings Twice Page 18
