Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed (6 page)

“Right here, boss,” she said, producing a box of physician’s disposable latex wear and a baggie from her purse.

“What a babe!” I said. Then, remembering my PC rules, quickly changed to “I mean, thank you Officer.”

Nancy snorted in good-natured disgust and handed me the box.

I pulled out a pair of gloves and snapped them on. Holding the bottle up to the light given off by the single bulb, it was easy to see that Mssr. Willie had taken quite a swig before putting the bottle on the shelf. I handed it to Nancy who had donned gloves of her own. Then I bagged the cigar and dropped it into my pocket along with the matchbook.

“Voilá!” I said. “As Archimedes so eloquently put it as he ran naked through the streets of Athens, ‘Eureka! Eureka!’”

“What do you mean, ‘You found it?’ I found it!” Nancy retorted, glaring at me.

“And I didn’t know you spoke Greek,” I said in surprise.

“Everyone knows what ‘eureka’ means.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, you get full credit. Make sure you mention yourself kindly when you type up the report tomorrow.”

“Gee, thanks, boss.”

Chapter 4

“
I know you
’
re not here for your elbow patches.” I laughed and lit a cigar. It was a full-throated laugh and I could see it was driving her crazy.

Her eyes were smoldering--smoldering as the passion that hung heavy in the room like some gigantic velvet curtain smothering the atmosphere that rose like the thin wisp of smoke from the extinguished match she had just used to light a cigar of her own.

“
That is the worst sentence I ever been involved in,” she said, disgust evident in her voice.

“
Evidently, you
’
ve never read me before.”

Yeah, I
’
ve seen a million of
‘
em and they were all alike. Unemployed English majors.

She was attractive in the sort of way that some heavy women with very short hair and no makeup, wearing a three piece brown-tweed suit with wingtips and smoking a cigar can be called attractive. She reminded me of my Aunt Mable. Or Winston Churchill.

“
All right,” she hissed, leaning over the desk, smoke escaping through her clenched teeth like the angry breath of some ancient pope. “Let
’
s get to the point.”

“
What
’
s your hurry?” I said, puffing smoke of my own right back in her face. “We
’
ve got plenty of time.” It wasn
’
t easy talking and puffing at the same time, but I had to show her I was every bit the man she was. And she was getting steamed. As steamed as last night
’
s clams.

“
This chapter
’
s half over thanks to your insipid metaphors. And if you want any semblance of a plot, not to mention character development, you
’
d better get moving.”

She was really ranting now. I could always tell when they were mad. This one was beet-red and her hands were clenching and unclenching the loaded shotgun that I had left sitting on the table. I suddenly realized I had made a tactical error. Still, I had her hooked like a tweed tuna and I had to reel her in. “These ain
’
t metaphors. Only an idiot would try to use an unlicensed metaphor in a detective story. These what I
’
m usin
’
is similes pure and simple.” I lit a cigar.

I thought it was ingenious, cloaking my superior knowledge in bad grammar to point up the ridiculousness of her statement. I even smiled as I saw the shotgun come up in slow motion. She was mad as a wet bishop and I had her right where I wanted her. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and Cecil, my sandwich delivery boy, burst in with my lunch.

• • •

Monday I slept late. I had given Nancy the bottle we’d found to take down to the lab in Boone so I figured that I had a slow morning coming. The phone started ringing just as I was wandering into the kitchen scratching places that men only scratch if there are no women in the house. I picked up the phone and clicked the ringer to “mute” at the same time I answered.

“Konig,” I said brusquely.

“Hayden, it’s almost 10:30. When’re you coming in.”

I recognized Nancy’s voice through my pre-caffeinated haze. “What’s up?”

“We’ve been waiting for you. You’ve got to hear this.”

“What is it?” I asked, now definitely awake. Nancy wouldn’t call unless it was important and now she had definitely stirred my interest.

“It’s a call that came into the station at 5:10 on Friday. Wanna hear it?”

“Can you play it over the phone?”

“You bet. Hang on a second.”

There was a pause—then Iard Dave’s dulcet baritone. “You’ve reached the St. Germaine Police Department. There is no one here to take your call. If it is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. Your call will be forwarded. Otherwise, please leave a message.”

I thought it sounded very professional. Just the way I wrote it.

There was a pause on the tape, then a long beep and then a voice.

“This here’s Willie Boyd up at St. Barnabas Church. There’s been a break-in. I don’t guess it’s no emergency, but all the wine is missing from the closet in the kitchen. Prob’ly three cases. I done fixed the lock on the closet door already. Thank you for your time.” Click.

Nancy came back on. “Did you get that?”

“Well, Casper the Holy Ghost!” I exclaimed. “What time did you say that call came in?”

“5:10.”

“So he was still alive at that point. What time was the 911 call?”

“We just got that from Boone. I sent Dave to get it at seven this morning. He took the bottle and the rest of the stuff down, too.”

“Have you listened to it?”

“Yep. It’s just a copy. They wouldn’t give us the real tape. It’s a woman’s voice. It’s familiar but I can’t place it. They record these calls so slowly it’s hard to recognize a particular voice sometimes. The time is 5:17 p.m.”

“Can you play it for me?”

“Nope. The answering machine is digital, but this is a cassette and the only cassette player is in your office. I can play it over the phone, but you might as well just come in.”

“Man.” I paused, doing the math. “That narrows it down to seven minutes.”

“Yep.” Nancy sounded almost perky. “He drank the poison sometime between 5:10 and 5:17.”

“Do we know it was poison? Is the lab report back?”

“Sorry. I was just guessing.”

“I’ll be there before noon. Hold down the fort.”

I put some coffee in the drip machine. I have an espresso machine too—one of my nods towards my ever-dwindling stock fortune—but I didn’t have time to fool with it this morning and besides, I needed to think.

I showered quickly and chose my green flannel shirt and chinos as my ensemble of the day. When you only have one shirt and one pair of pants that are clean, it’s a pretty easy choice. I picked up a load of laundry, threw it in the washing machine and set them happily gyrating as I headed back to the kitchen for my coffee. Then I called Georgia Wester, who had prepared the altar for Sunday’s service. She answered on the second ring.

“Hi Georgia. Hayden. Listen, did you get the bread and wine ready for communion on Saturday like you usually do?”

“Nope. I knew I wod be gone on Saturday so I did it on Friday before lunch.”

“So you had a bottle of wine on the counter in the sacristy?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. Bye.”

I got my list off the refrigerator and checked it over. Basically nothing new here except the time of death and the wine theft. I made some notes and shoved the list in my pocket. Maybe I could recognize the voice on the 911 tape. I had a better ear than Nancy and I knew most of the people in the congregation. I poured a large cup of coffee into a traveling mug and got into my old blue chariot, popping in a Wynton Marsalis
Baroque Music for Trumpets
CD. I had one stop to make before I got into town. The McCollough’s trailer.

• • •

The McCollough’s place was about halfway between my spread and town, up in the hills and hard to find. Ardine McCollough lived with her three children in a 1972 vintage mobile home that was definitely showing its age. I don’t know what happened to Ardine’s husband, PeeDee. According to local legend, he just disappeared one day. I suspect he simply took off, but the rumor whispered around town was that he had been murdered by Ardine and buried somewhere down in the holler. Ardine never filed a missing persons report and I didn’t put any stock in the rumors, so I never bothered to investigate. He’d been gone for five years, leaving when the youngest child was still a baby. PeeDee was a physically abusive son-of-a-bitch with a penchant for drinking coupled with a quick temper. I had been out to their trailer to have a few serious chats with him—once, after Ardine had checked into the emergency room in Boone. I had even locked him up once, but Ardine declined to press charges and he was out in twenty-four hours, sober as a judge and promising never to do it again. I had heard through the town grapevine that he had started taking his frustrations out on Bud, the oldest child, but I hadn’t seen any evidence of it firsthand. All this considered, it was my feeling that if Ardine truly had done what it was rumored she’d done, then I figured she had to live with it.

One thing the man
did
do before he left, was name his children after beer. The oldest boy, Bud, was fourteen, and he was the one that had been caught stealing wine all over town last year. Name-wise, he was a lucky one, because the shortened version of Budweiser at least resembled a common name. The second child was named Pauli Girl. She was twelve. The youngest was a cute six-year old boy named Moose-Head—Moosey for short.

Moosey greeted me as I drove up the dirt drive to the trailer. He was playing in a rock pile, heaving stones bigger than his head down a ravine beside the drive.

“Hayden!” he yelled as I pulled up. He dropped the rock he had balanced over his head and met me as I stepped out of my truck with a bear hug around both my legs.

“Let go, Moosey. If I fall, we’ll break at least three legs. Why aren’t you in school?”

“Teacher’s workday.” He was laughing and going throu my pockets, looking for the candy bar I almost always brought him.

“Where is it?” he asked, looking very disappointed when he didn’t find anything.

“Sorry, I forgot. Tell you what. I’ll drop by on the way home and bring you something good. How’s that?”

He was placated immediately and resumed rearranging the rock pile.

Ardine was standing on the porch. She had her hands crossed in front of her very defensively, her elbows tucked into her sides and a scowl on her face as if she expected the worst. She was wearing a cotton dress that she had probably made herself, just as she made most of their clothes. Her graying hair was pulled into a loose ponytail. Over her dress was an old cardigan sweater, several sizes too large, making her appear even smaller and more bird-like than she was. Her face was thin and lined and she might once have been very pretty. Now in her early forties, she had the look of someone who had lived a hard life. Her right eye had a slight droop and didn’t close all the way when she blinked, which she did often, thanks chiefly to the nerve damage that PeeDee had inflicted upon it with a left hook after a night of drinking. I had rarely seen her smile. She worked at a nearby Christmas tree farm. I had no doubt that it was hard, manual labor and that she actually brought home less money than she would with the state’s unemployment check.

I went up the steps to the porch.

“Get to it,” she said quietly, chewing on her lower lip.

“Ardine, I just need to ask Bud a couple of questions. Don’t get upset.”

“What’s he done now?”

“I don’t know that he’s done anything. I just need to ask him a few things. He hasn’t been in trouble since last year has he?”

“No.”

“And he wasn’t in trouble before that, was he?”

“No.”

“Then it’s probably nothing. But I do need to talk to him.”

Her shoulders slumped and she looked resigned to whatever was coming. “C’mon in then.”

I went in the front door, sat down on the sofa. I looked around the trailer which was, as always, as neat as Matilda’s hat-pin. Ardine had made the curtains, the slipcovers, the quilts—everything—from castoffs and free remnants she got at the fabric store in Boone. It was a deal that I put together for her. I know the owner.