2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 (16 page)

Schwartz ignored him and circled the room.

“Can you account for your whereabouts from say quarter to eleven this morning to three this afternoon?”

Blake thought a moment.

“I have you again, Sheriff. Yes, I can.” He didn’t know if Schwartz was pleased or disappointed. “I went to Saint Anne’s Church in Roanoke this morning. I got there at about eleven. I took old Route 11 instead of the interstate. It would take me at least forty-five minutes to an hour to drive there, I think you would agree, so that meant I had to leave here at,
say ten-twenty.
The secretary there saw me and will verify when I was there. I spent the day, most of it, in the city. I have proof. Here is my lunch receipt. Kebabs. Note the time stamp. Here is a credit slip for some theater tickets I had to cancel. Again, please note the time. I was there, not here. I have a receipt for a key I had made…time stamp. Do you need more? I parked in a garage and the ticket will—”

Schwartz held up his hand and inspected the ticket and credit slip.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay? Is that all you’re going to say to me? Okay? Aren’t you going to tell me why you are here at least? Why you think I need a lawyer, and why I need to account for my movements today?”

“Millicent Bass,” he said.

“What about Mrs. Bass?”

“She’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Murdered.”

“Murdered? When? Oh, I see, today sometime between eleven this morning and three this afternoon, right? And naturally, the first person you thought of was me, the murderous vicar, the Philadelphia Ripper, right?”

“Actually no, Reverend. But I wanted to get you out of the way. I have to ask.”

“Okay. You want to fill me in on the details? I’ve got to make an accounting of this to my Board and congregation. My God, poor Millie.”

“A neighbor called about noon. Said Mrs. Bass didn’t show up for a luncheon engagement. Essie, that’s our dispatcher, told her missing lunches were not a police matter. The caller said, she knew that, but Mrs. Bass also missed her dentist appointment. No idea how she knew that—I’ll have to ask. Anyway, she said she went to her house and saw Bass’ Buick in the driveway but when she knocked, no one came to the door. Our dispatcher sent a car around. Officers banged on all the doors. One opened by itself—don’t give me that look, it did—so they call out, no answer, and go in. The place has been trashed and she’s on the floor. Somebody shot her.”

“What do you mean, the place was trashed?”

“Whoever killed her, tossed her house. Drawers pulled out and dumped on the floor, closets emptied, desk rifled. The place is a mess. We figure she must have stepped out for a minute, maybe started for the dentist, forgot something and came back to find some guy robbing her house. Then he bumped her off.”

“That would mean that the killer knew she had a dentist’s appointment and would be gone long enough to pull the robbery.”

“Or maybe he knew she worked all morning for you. Either way, you’re right, he knew her routine.”

“What if he or she, whoever, was not there to rob her, but was looking for something?”

“What would they be looking for?”

“Dr. Taliaferro’s files. The ones that used to be in the box you found in the back lot, remember?”

“I thought you said kids dumped them in the trash.”

“I said I thought they might have. I don’t think so anymore.”

Blake filled him in on his discovery of the keys and what he thought they meant. He mentioned Philip’s earlier request to find the files. He told him about Millie’s habitual gossiping and the reactions to it.

“She must have gotten hold of those files to use in her dishing the dirt sessions. Someone found out and went to get them from her. She walks in, and the person is caught red-handed, he panics and shoots her.”

“Pretty drastic, don’t you think?” Schwartz said, one eyebrow arched. “Why not just confront her and demand the files, threaten to expose her if she didn’t. Why shoot her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe this will help.” Blake retrieved the message tape from his desk drawer. He replaced the tape in the machine and fast-forwarded it to the last message. Schwartz listened carefully, asked to hear it again.

“You recognize the voice?” he asked.

“No, not really. It sounds vaguely familiar, but no, I don’t.”

“Can I have this?”

“You can borrow it. I want it back, though. There are other messages on that tape.”

“I’ll make a copy of this last bit, and give it back tomorrow.” He got up to leave.

“Can I look at Millie’s house? I want to be sure the files aren’t there.”

“I can’t let you in a crime scene. There are rules, and if you did find something it could compromise the chain of evidence.”

“Yeah, right. I guess you watch too much television, too, Sheriff. Besides, I would just be there to identify and claim church property.”

“Okay, tomorrow, seven a.m., but no funny business.”

He left. Blake looked at the clock. Quarter to twelve, too late to call Mary. And seven in the morning would be too early. He shook his head in frustration. Even in death, Millie Bass could ruin his day.

Chapter Thirty

Sunlight crept through the pines making long slender shadows from their trunks. Hardly anyone would be up this early. Grace Franks loved the early morning when the air still retained some of the night’s coolness and quiet. She twisted a piece of paper and lit it with her butane lighter. It caught and flared. She dropped it into the burn barrel and watched as the rest of the papers lying in the bottom caught and slowly, one by one, curled, turned black, and crumbled into ashes. She stood over her fire, acrid smoke swirling around her head, occasionally stirring the contents of the barrel. She raised her arms. From a distance, with her high cheekbones and tan skin, she looked like one of the witches from
Macbeth
or a perhaps a slim, pagan priestess officiating at a fire ritual. Morning was a good time to burn things.

Burn barrels were a thing of the past, illegal even. Young people whose memories didn’t include a time when trash was a personal responsibility, not a municipal entitlement, had moved into her neighborhood. They built fancy houses, ran water mains and forced her to cap her well—outsiders and pushy Baby Boomers, or were they Xers? She could never keep them straight. And now there were the Millennials—the M generation. She qualified as a Boomer but had never felt a part of her generation.

Her new neighbors did not approve of her and her barrel. They zealously recycled. They worried about the deer population, the ecology, the ozone layer and generally made a nuisance of themselves. They thought the smoke from Grace’s barrel polluted the air, represented a health hazard, or caused global warming. So now a truck picked up her trash twice a week, a service for which she had to pay a monthly assessment. But Grace still preferred burning things, especially things she did not trust to the trash truck or its nosey crew.

***

Mary stared at the phone. Her eyes, accented by dark smudges, were red from crying. She had not slept. She sat huddled in her pajamas, hugging herself, her robe pulled tight over her shoulders. She watched the sunlight seep through her kitchen window and creep across the tile floor toward her feet.

At midnight, she had acknowledged he would not call, but she waited anyway. Now, at six thirty in the morning, her hopes rose a bit. He might call. If he had gotten home late, he wouldn’t have, but maybe this morning….

She sipped her coffee and watched the minutes tick away. He was not going to call, that day or ever, she decided. She went upstairs to shower and repair her face. She had to get ready for work.

***

Blake met Schwartz at Millie’s house at exactly seven. Schwartz handed him his tape.

“Did you call her?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The lady on the tape, the one who apologized and asked you to call her. Did you?”

“No, it was too late last night and too early this morning. I’ll try later.”

The sheriff stared at him, hands on his hips, and shook his head. “Reverend, you are clueless,” he said. “For all your education and cultured clerical empathy, you careen through life without a scrap of common sense when it comes to women, which, by the way, we already knew from your antics in Philadelphia. But I had no idea that on top of cluelessness, you were also stupid.”

Blake felt his face getting red.

“Look, I’m not stupid, it’s just that—”

“That woman was on her knees to you. My guess is she sat by that telephone all night, and would have taken a call from you at three in the morning. She was in tears. Do you have any idea what it cost her to make that call?”

Blake started to say something but Schwartz put up his hand and waved off his protest.

“Call her.”

He walked back to his car and retrieved his cell phone and called. No answer.

“No answer,” he said.

“What a jerk,” Schwartz muttered, but Blake heard him and his face reddened further. They let themselves into Millie Bass’ house.

As Schwartz said, it had been trashed. Papers were scattered all over the floor. Drawers were pulled out from cabinets and dressers and their contents tossed every which way. The kitchen was worse. Whoever shot Millie had opened canisters and dumped the contents on the floor. Napkins, silverware, and groceries were scattered everywhere. Room by room, Blake took in the chaos. He pivoted around, searching for anything that might look like a file folder. In what must have been a den, he found a pile of manila folders. Their labels, however, indicated they were personal files, photographs, bills and dozens of travel brochures, but no sign of Dr. Taliaferro’s notes.

“If he was after the files, he must have gotten them,” Blake said. His heart sank. Millie’s death was bad enough, but to know the files were still floating around out there somewhere made the day overwhelmingly bleak.

“Satisfied, Reverend?”

“I guess. Say, could you possibly call me Blake? Besides the bad grammar, I really don’t like being called Reverend, Rev. or any variation on it.”

“And you would call me Ike?”

“Well, yeah….”

“I’ll think about it.”

Blake returned to his car and drove back to the church. He programmed Mary’s number into speed-dial and called every five minutes from then on.

Chapter Thirty-one

Grace watched sadly as the last embers of her fire died down. She did not mourn the loss of her fire. She just did not want to go back into the house, and the fire served as an excuse to stay outdoors. Her gaze wandered across to the yard next door. She watched Donald Jenkins’ backside appear in the patio door. He backed out carefully, easing a wheelchair over the small rise created by the doorsill, and then wheeled his wife, Betty, onto the patio. Grace could hear him murmuring to her as he maneuvered the chair into the small gazebo at the edge of the terrace.

He looked up and waved to Grace. She waved back.

“How are you, Betty?” she called.

Betty had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. She had been getting worse for years. Donald had taken early retirement and devoted his days to caring for her. Everyone said he was a saint. Betty struggled to lift her head and gave Grace a weak smile. There was a flutter at her wrist that Grace took for a wave. Poor woman. Donald stood behind Betty and held up his right hand with all five fingers spread and raised his eyebrows. Grace shook her head. He shrugged his shoulders and looked disappointed.

***

Blake climbed the short flight of stairs to Millie’s office. Not her office anymore. He would have to find another secretary. Funny thing about that, a day ago he had looked forward to replacing her. Today the thought hung over him like a dark cloud. At the top of the stairs, he glanced to his left and froze, one foot in midair. The office looked like Millie’s house. Papers were strewn everywhere, her desk drawers emptied and the contents of the supply closet dumped on the floor.

The office had been in order the previous evening. He stepped carefully over the mess and peeked into his office. It looked the same. He stared at the supply closet. Anything missing? He let his eyes wander over the emptied and disordered shelves. Then he saw, or more accurately, he did not see—Taliaferro’s box was missing. Who would want to steal his old sermon notes?

He called Schwartz and told him what he found and that the space had been neat as a pin the day before.

“And don’t ask me if I have a lawyer,” he snapped.

“Wasn’t planning to, that goes without saying. No, what I want is for you get into your house and lock the door. I’ll come fetch you as soon as I get there.”

“What? Why should I do that?”

“Well, I’m thinking about that message on your machine. It seems pretty clear that someone is after those files. He or she obviously didn’t get them and will assume that if they were not at Bass’, and not in the office, you know where they are. He’ll come looking for them and you don’t want to be there when he does. The guy has a gun, remember?”

“I’ll be fine right here. I’ll just lock up and…he’s got a key, doesn’t he.”

“Everybody has a key.”

“I’ll wait for you in the house.”

“You do that. You can call that lady while you wait.”

“Call the lady…? Oh, yeah, I’ll do that. Oh, and Sheriff…?”

“Yeah?”

“You’d need a court order to do it, but what do you think about putting a tap on the phones? If I get another call, you might be able to trace it or at least identify the caller.”

Schwartz grunted something and agreed.

Blake locked the church and strode quickly toward his house, keys in hand. Then he remembered he had not locked the deadbolt on his front door. The killer could be waiting for him in the house. He hesitated halfway across the parking lot. He thought he would be safe outside. Suppose the killer had a rifle? He heard his phone ring. He decided to make a dash for it and raced the rest of the way to the house, went in and picked up the phone.

“Hello,” he barked, his eyes frantically scanning the room, ears alert for suspicious sounds.

“Blake?” The voice sounded small and frightened.

“Mary? I am so glad you called. I have been trying to reach you all day,” he said more softly, and sank into an armchair, all thoughts of killers, guns, and ambush evaporated.

“You have, really?”

“Really, truly.”

He was still on the phone when Schwartz slipped into the room, service revolver held two-handed.

“The door was wide open, I thought maybe….” He stopped talking when he saw the grin on Blake’s face. “That the lady?”

Blake nodded.

“What a jerk,” he said, but this time more kindly.