4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4 (3 page)

Chapter 4

Ruth Harris stared through her office window at newly mown grass. Her freshly polished nails tapped out the hesitant beat to
Memories
as she contemplated time—the passage of time to be precise. Outside, spring tiptoed into the Shenandoah Valley. New growth pushed out from early buds, birds sang their courting songs, and gray squirrels cavorted across the lawn. Soon Callend College’s signature wisteria with its lavender panicles would be in full bloom and the postcard appearance of the campus would be complete. Greenup time. A time for new beginnings, new…new what?

Agnes Ewalt, her secretary, stood across the desk and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Finally, her patience apparently exhausted, she snapped open her dictation book, poised a freshly sharpened pencil and said, “Dr. Harris, you wanted me?”

Ruth surfaced from her reverie. Agnes, dictation pad, work.

“Yes, and you won’t need that, Agnes. I just want you to go down to the library, please, and find out whatever you can on Jonathan Lydell—the current one who lives over in Bolton. I believe there may be multiple Jonathan Lydells, certainly there were in the past because he’s a ‘fourth.’ At any rate, I want the one who wrote this.” She pushed a letter across the desk to Agnes who picked it up and glanced at its contents.

Agnes had already read it and her expression confirmed it to be one she’d seen, and not one that might have slipped by her or Ruth had received at home. She refolded it and slipped it into her dictation book.

“Are you sure the college library will have something on Mr. Lydell?”

“I think maybe…no, certainly. He donated half a dozen books recently and if I remember correctly, they were Lydell family history, things like that. I think he must want to teach or something. I can’t be sure.”

Callend College, in spite of persistent and quite inaccurate rumors about an industrial park to be built in the vicinity, endured as Picketsville’s primary claim to fame and major industry. Its library, while heavily academic in nature, was better than the county’s down on Main Street. If anything was to be found on a subject, it would be down the hall from the president’s office, Ruth’s office, or would require a trip to Richmond.

“Are you all right?” Agnes said.

“What? Yes, I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

“You look distracted. Is something bothering you?”

The clock on the mantelpiece dinged ten. It had been a present from Ruth’s former department members when she left them to lead Callend College into the twentieth-first century. It was a modern clock set in lexan or some clear acrylic material and seemed wholly out of place on her neo-Georgian mantel. In truth she was not fine. The notion that time had crept up on her nagged at her lately. Her biological clock ticked away in sync with the one over the fireplace and furthermore, Sheriff Ike Schwartz intruded into her thoughts far more than she cared to admit. She sighed.

“I’m fine,” she repeated and pivoted her chair around, away from the window. She attacked the pile of papers in her in-box and, glancing up, realized that Agnes was still planted in front of her. “That’s it, Agnes, thank you.”

“May I speak plainly?”

“What? Certainly. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s about your…about you and the sheriff.”

Ruth let her eyelids drop for a moment. “Sheriff Schwartz, you mean?”

“Yes. I…that is we…well the truth is, we were wondering what you intended to do about that…situation.”

That situation
meant the faculty, for their part, was less than pleased that Ruth and Ike had become, not to put too fine a point on it, lovers. Certainly, they would not admit to anything approaching intellectual snobbery, but in truth, they felt Ruth had become involved in a relationship with someone far beneath her. Curiously, the good people of Picketsville, in turn, agreed with them but not for the same reason. They felt that Ike should stick with his own kind—folks like themselves, folks whom they viewed as akin to the Biblical salt of the earth.

“Agnes, you are a superb secretary and a very loyal friend, so I believe I can speak frankly.”

“You would anyway.”

“Yes, well. You and the faculty cabal that put you up to this should know that what I do with my private life is my business. So to you and to them—butt out.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“And furthermore, whether you or they are willing to admit it or not, Isaac Schwartz is as qualified to be a member of this faculty, in the unlikely event that he would ever want to, as well over half the people on our payroll, and some of them in tenured positions at that. So please…no more town-gown crap, okay?”

Agnes’ face flushed a bright red. “Yes Ma’am.” She turned and left the office.

Ruth sighed again and turned her attention to the papers on her desk.

The clock sounded the quarter hour.

***

Ike had Karl drive back to the sheriff’s office while he leaned back and closed his eyes. He had a murder on his hands and it was going to be a dilly.

“Sometime this afternoon, get back to Lydell’s and interview his daughter.”

“Daughter?”

“Yes. She lives with him. People tell me she drinks. I don’t know. Whenever I’ve talked with her she seemed pretty normal, but you can never tell with drinkers. Anyway, she was ‘indisposed’ as Lydell put it, so see what you can find out from her later today.”

“I got it. Now, explain that lock thing to me again. I don’t get it. The lock is screwed to the door, not set in it?”

“Right. In the past, locks, like the one Henry knocked open, were as much a part of the décor as the door. The casings were usually brass and polished every day. They were attached to the door, not inserted into it. The bolt fit into a keeper, also brass, polished, and attached to the jamb. Some developers of new houses are installing reproductions on colonial style mansions here in the valley and there is a big market for reproductions.”

“No kidding.”

“No kidding. Anyway, from the outside—or the exterior, you need a fairly long stemmed key to engage the lock on the backside of the door. The point is…” Ike frowned and thought through his discussion with Lydell earlier, “…if the key is wedged in the lock on the inside, you can’t really get at it from the outside. So, Henry had to break down the door.”

They drove in silence for a few moments.

“Karl, speaking of Henry, what did you learn from that elegant display of body art while I was in the basement?”

“Well, for one thing, and for what it’s worth, he is not angry you passed him over for the deputy’s job. He thinks you hired me. I told him you haven’t hired anyone, yet. Second, Lydell, he says, is cheap, arrogant, and has a high opinion of himself based on his membership in all that alphabet soup you told me about when we arrived.”

“Soup?”

“DAR, FFV, that soup.”

“Oh. And…?”

“Lydell writes books and is thinking of turning his home into a reenactment tourist stop.”

“A what?”

“You know, like Williamsburg—people in costumes showing folks around ‘de ole plantation.’ He’s restoring three slave quarter cabins out back. I don’t know where he’s going to find any black folks to play slaves, but that’s what Henry says he has in mind.”

“Maybe you could volunteer. Is he paying?”

“No way, Boss…oh, and I had a chance to talk with Mrs. Antonelli. She’s from New Jersey. She made a point of telling me her niece was dating an African American.”

“What?”

“Northern liberal angst. She wants me to know she’s not a racist.”

“But when she says something like that—”

“It tells me that she is, in the upside down way…‘Some of my best friends…’ and all that.”

They’d turned the corner and left the shady two-hundred-year-old trees that lined the Old Coach Road to Bolton. Ike put on his sun glasses. Karl had never taken his off.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. This might be important. Mrs. Antonelli says that Grotz booked the room in her place, but was more than happy to swap with another guest who had been placed across the street. Apparently her brochure states that in the event too many guests arrive and the room configuration can not accommodate the various combinations of guests—”

“I get it.”

“—and Lydell gets paid for the inconvenience. Anyway, this one guy was disappointed. He’d wanted to stay in the two-century old inn. So Grotz said, ‘No problem,’ and he offered to change places, even seemed eager to do it. Very nice of him she thought.”

“Why would that be important?”

“I don’t know, but in my experience, such as it is, small things, even inconsequential stuff like this, can come back on you later, like…”

“Like?”

“Like chili peppers.”

“Or door keys.”

Chapter 5

Henry Sutherlin watched the police car disappear down Old Coach Road and turned back toward Lydell’s house. He gazed at the door and its lock, its screws nearly pulled free, and the receiver lying on the floor. He frowned and scratched his head. Henry and his six brothers grew up in Picketsville and had been raised in its history and folklore. So, he figured Ike must know about the first Lydell house murder. Of course, the new guy, the Black Stork, they called him around town, he wouldn’t, and so he didn’t ask. But you’d have thought Ike would have. He bent over and was about to pick up the receiver when a big guy in a pair of blue overalls and latex gloves yelled, “Don’t touch that.”

The evidence technicians were working the scene. Henry jerked back and apologized. He spent the next two hours watching them work. One of them, a short thin guy Henry thought he remembered from high school, but whose name he couldn’t recall, had a set of tattoos that must have cost a bundle. The same guy had a lip ring and a nose stud. At that moment Henry thought he knew where his future lay. He might be too weird for the police and too stubborn to give up his singular appearance, but the ET’s—they understood this new world of self-expression. He decided he would resubmit his application for the police academy and this time he would actually do the work. Then he’d study up and be an ET.

“Great work, there,” he said to the short guy, and pointed to a particularly garish orange and green beach scene on the guy’s upper arm. “Say, I remember your face but can’t place the name.”

“Bob DeGraaf,” the guy said, “I was two years behind you in school.”

“Now I got you. You used to pole vault.”

“That’s me.”

Henry stuck out his hand. “Henry Sutherlin, Bob. So, how’d you get into the ET business?”

“Funny about that. I liked science and the idea came to me I could be a healthcare provider of some sort. Since my old man was a corpsman in the marines, I took some pre-nursing courses down at the Community College. I did pretty good in biology and chemistry, but I pulled a C in A and P, and that slammed that door shut. I liked the science stuff, so I read about openings in this line and did the academy, took the ET course, and here I am.”

“A and P? Like the grocery store, A and P?”

“Anatomy and Physiology. It’s a course you have to pass with a B to get into the Nursing track.”

“Oh. What’s it about?”

“It’s how your body is put together and how it works.”

“Hey, DeGraaf,” the big guy yelled, “we don’t have all day.”

“I have to get back to work, Henry. I can send you something if you want.”

“Super. Send me whatever you have. You know where I live?”

“I can get your address from your brother, Billy.”

“Great tats, by the way.”

“Thanks. Back at you.”

The coroner arrived, wrote his notes, and released the dead man to the morgue. Henry watched the men bag the victim’s clothes, luggage, and books. They didn’t miss anything, Henry thought.

Afternoon sun glinted off the silver of the painted tin roof on the B&B across the street. He retreated to the shade in the back yard where the partially assembled “slave quarters” stood and wandered over to the stack of logs and lumber waiting to be incorporated into the structures. Lydell had stacked a few weathered, rough-cut pine doors as well. Henry pushed at them with his toe and one fell forward. He managed to stop its fall and its lock, its screws long since released from their tight set in the dried out pine, fell out and landed at his feet. He reset the door and stared at the lock.

“Okay,” he said, “Let’s say I’m the ET on this case, so what do I look for here?” He scrutinized the lock and mentally took a picture of it
in situ
. He picked it up and studied it for any indication it had been tampered with. He knew it would have been dusted for prints first, but…He replaced it on the door, reset the screws in their holes, lifted the door, and watched as the lock fell away again. He smiled and then frowned, and shook his head. Just for a minute, he thought he had it…But then he’d remembered he had to hit the door twice before it gave way…still. He tossed the lock on the ground and strolled toward the street. He’d have to mull it over some more.

Wouldn’t it be a hoot, he thought, if he figured out how the door thing worked before Ike or the Black Stork did? Yeah, he sure would mull it over, there had to be an answer.

***

“Henry, Billy,” Dorothy Sutherlin bellowed, “you wash up and get in here for your lunch. Land sakes, I been fixing this meal for hours and you boys just a shilly-shallying around is enough to send me to the institute.”

Henry and his brother Billy were the only boys at home, but their mother called to them as though the other five were still in the house—at the top of her lungs. She had done so for over three decades. Dorothy Sutherlin raised seven sons, most of the time as a single mother, back in a time when that appellation did not carry the quasi-heroic quality it does now. Except for her youngest, all of her boys had chosen professions that placed them in harm’s way. Billy worked with Ike as a deputy. Frank joined the highway patrol right out of high school. Michael, the twins, Jack and Johnny, chose the army. Danny joined the Navy SEALs and was stationed over in Little Creek, but she never knew where he would be on any given day. The last time she’d seen him he had a Purple Heart and a limp, but he wouldn’t say how or where he’d earned them. Jack had been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Every night Dorothy knelt by her bed on arthritic knees and prayed for her boys, that they would stay safe wherever their country sent them, and even though she sometimes despaired for her tattooed youngest, she secretly hoped he’d remain an oddball and safely home.

Billy, still in uniform, punched his younger brother on the arm. “Where you been, Sunshine?”

“Had some hours out at Lydell’s. You probably heard about the murder.”

“You were there?”

Dorothy Sutherlin beat on the backside of a skillet and shouted at her boys a second time. Ham, sweet potatoes, and fresh picked asparagus filled bowls and platters on the table. Billy and Henry sat and tucked in.

“I was the one that busted down the door. Didn’t Ike or the new guy say anything?”

“No, I was leaving when they came in. Just got the gist. So, what happened?”

Their mother gave them a look. “Grace first,” she said, and the three bowed their heads while she thanked the Almighty for the day, the food, and keeping them all safe. Henry filled them in on the details, laying heavy emphasis on his role in breaking down the door. He described the scene and what he’d learned from the ET’s.

“I reckon, that’s what I’ll do, Billy. I’m going to give the academy another try and see about being an evidence tech.”

Billy stared at his brother’s amazing red hair and raised an eyebrow.

“Hey, there was this guy, DeGraaf, you know? He used to go to the high school, and he had all kinds of tattoos on him and they hired him. So, okay, I’ll have to take care of the hair for a while…and um, maybe the ears, I’m not sure about that…and yeah, I’ll have to study…and…you don’t think I can do it, do you?”

“I ain’t said anything.”

“It’s all over your face…you just wait and see.”

“I have enough sons in danger. Don’t you go joining them, Henry, you hear?”

“Being an ET ain’t the same thing, Ma. Anyway, I thought I had the solution to the locked door thing this afternoon but it didn’t work.”

“What did you think?”

“See, I was poking around an old door and noticed that the lock…it was set like the one we busted, you know, on the back of the door…I see this old lock just fall off the door and I think, what if the lock was busted before we got there, see?”

“See what?”

“Come on Billy, you’re the cop, if the door was already broke and Lydell just pretended it was locked up tight, who’d know? Then when the door’s busted open, you just see screws lying around and you don’t ask if maybe they were pulled out before.”

Billy nodded, impressed. “So why doesn’t it work?”

“I banged the door down and I’m here to tell you that lock was set in solid. I had to whack it twice before she gave way.”

“Lydell ain’t your candidate?”

“Nah, he might bore you to death, or talk you to death but…no, shooting a stranger don’t seem likely.”

“So what’s your theory now, Mr. ET?”

“Don’t have one. Wait, how about this? You and me have a contest. The one that figures it out first wins and the loser has to buy dinner somewhere nice.”

Billy grinned. “You’re on, only we add that Ma gets in on the dinner.”

“Done. I’m thinking mistaken identity, now. What’s your guess?”

Billy narrowed his eyes and said nothing.