And a Puzzle to Die On (12 page)

“You’re right. A fair assessment of what you said would be,
What a load of crap
. Really, Cora, this isn’t like you.” Chief Harper stopped, bit his lip. He realized what he’d just said was too close to the bone. Cora really wasn’t acting herself, hadn’t been since her last intended trip to the altar had ended tragically. “What would be the point of running this plate?”

“Well, it would be good practice for you. You’ll know how to do it when I find the real car.”

“I know how to run a license plate.”

“Good. Then you’ll have no trouble running this one. Tell me, Chief, what do you think of Sergeant Walpole?”

“I don’t know a
thing
about Sergeant Walpole. I’ve never
heard
of Sergeant Walpole. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. The number of times we’ve had to cooperate with the Danbury police you can count on the fingers of one hand.”

“Aw, hell.”

“You’re making too much of this, Cora. I don’t want to see you going out on a limb and getting hurt.”

“Least of my worries.”

Cora went out the front door of the police station, stomped up the steps of the Bakerhaven Library.

The librarian, Edith Potter, had her hair styled in a trendy flip cut, chestnut with blond highlights.

“Hey, nice haircut, Edith,” Cora said.

The librarian smiled. “Reckless extravagance, twice a year. The rest of the time it grows out and I put it in a little bun like a stereotypical librarian.”

“How does Hal like it?”

“Depends what’s on TV. If it’s the NFL, Hal doesn’t even notice.”

Cora chuckled, said, “Is Jimmy around?”

Edith’s face showed concern. “What’s Jimmy done now?”

“Nothing. Aaron said he’d look stuff up for me.”

Edith smiled. “Yes. He’s good at that.”

Jimmy Potter was working upstairs in the stacks. A gawky boy of college age, the librarian’s son had always been a little slow, but he was very eager to please, and liked to be asked.

Jimmy was thrilled to help the Puzzle Lady. “Sure, Miss Felton. What do you need?”

“Can you find newspaper articles from about twenty years ago?”

“Sure. That’s how it’s filed, by date.”

“I’m looking for the Darryl Daigue trial. You know about the Darryl Daigue trial, Jimmy?”

“Sure. Killed that girl.”

“Well, I need to find newspaper articles about the murder and the trial. Can you help me find those?”

“Did my mom say to do it?”

The question surprised Cora. She thought Jimmy would be eager to help. “I asked her if you could.”

“Good deal,” Jimmy said. “That means I can print out things. If Mom doesn’t say so, I can’t print out things. Then you gotta look through the viewer, or I gotta write it down.”

“Your mom knows about it,” Cora assured him. “Can you find the articles all right?”

“Sure can.”

Jimmy plunged out of the stacks, whirled around a spiral staircase to the ground floor, and darted through a doorway.

Cora followed at a more leisurely pace. By the time she reached the ground floor, Jimmy was back with the first article.

“You can sit in the reading room, Miss Felton. I’ll bring you the rest. Printing out is good.”

Jimmy darted out again.

Cora dumped her drawstring purse on the large wooden table that dominated the reading room, and sat in one of the dozen chairs that surrounded it. There were only two other people in the room, a man reading the paper, and a woman with a reference book. Cora sniffed at the prominently displayed
NO SMOKING
sign on the wall, then turned her attention to the printout.

CO-ED KILLED
was the headline. It appeared to have run the width of the front page. Jimmy Potter had shrunk it down so it fit on an ordinary piece of copy paper. Unfortunately, that shrunk the text to a size Cora could have read only with a microscope. She harumphed loudly enough to incur a baleful glare from the man with the paper, then discovered a second page under the first. She pulled it out, saw that Jimmy had also printed out an enlargement of the column without the headline.

Cora raised her eyebrows. How about that. Something already. Cora knew the two high school students from the trial transcripts. According to their testimony, they’d joined the police search and found Anita’s body. A contradiction. Of course, one easily explained. The
young couple had gone to the icehouse to make out. Either they or their parents hadn’t wanted them to testify to that fact. “Joined the police search” was a useful euphemism. Still, it was a fact at variance.

Cora wondered how many others there might be.

There were no more in the initial article, but Cora had barely finished it when Jimmy Potter bounced in with a stack of papers. “There’s more, there’s more!” he whispered, and bounced out again.

Cora sat and read it all. For the most part, it was stuff she already knew. There was no mention anywhere of the recently deceased then counter-boy Ricky Gleason. If Darryl Daigue had told his lawyer, his lawyer certainly hadn’t passed it on. The counter boy was to all intents and purposes the man who wasn’t there.

Jimmy kept the printouts coming. Cora sat there for hours, sifting through the articles, but came up empty.

At last Jimmy came back with nothing in his hands.

“That’s it?” Cora said.

Jimmy heard the disappointment in her voice. His face fell. “Didn’t find what you wanted?”

“No, no, you did well,” Cora assured him. “I just wish there was more.”

“There’s one more article, but I can’t print it out.”

“Why’s that, Jimmy?”

“ ’Cause it’s not what you wanted. The trial or the murder. It’s not one of those.”

“What is it, Jimmy?”

“It’s just a whachamacallit. Not news, just a meet-the-townsfolk. They did one on me, once,” he said proudly. “Working in the library. With a picture and everything.”

“A human-interest story?”

“That’s what they said.” Jimmy laughed. “Which is kind of stupid. Like the other stories interest
animals
?”

“They did a human-interest story on Anita Dryer?”

Jimmy shook his head. “No. On Darryl Daigue.”

“Oh. I’d like to see that, Jimmy.”

“I’m not sure Mom wants me to print it out. ’Cause it’s not about the
murder
.”

“It’s okay. I’ll go with you.”

Jimmy led Cora through a door off the reference room into a long, narrow room lined with what at first glance appeared to be library card-catalog files, but proved to hold tiny canisters of microfilm. He pointed out a desk at the far wall with a computer and scanner on it. “We’re transferring the microfilm to computer. Then we burn it on CD-ROM.”

“You can do that?”

“Sure can. But that’s just getting started. Most everything you want you gotta see like this.” Jimmy pointed to a desk where a viewer was threaded up with microfilm. “That’s the article there, Miss Felton. Look through this hole here. You see these knobs? You turn this one if the picture’s fuzzy. And this one makes it go up and down.”

Cora peered into the viewer. The picture was indeed fuzzy. She turned the knob to bring it into focus.

WHO IS DARRYL DAIGUE?
was the headline.

Cora could see why Jimmy didn’t think the article would pass muster. The murder trial was referred to only to identify who Darryl Daigue was. The article itself concerned Daigue’s life in Bakerhaven, and focused
on his job at the diner. Several of his coworkers were mentioned. Maddeningly, none of them were Ricky Gleason.

Cora read with disappointment to the bottom of the column.

The last sentence read:

Darryl Daigue’s girlfriend, Cindy Tambourine, declined to be interviewed
.

Cora’s mouth stretched into a grin. She practically purred. “Thanks, Jimmy. Good job!”

Cora beat it out of the library, hustled across the street.

Chief Harper grimaced as she came in. “Twice in one day? Cora, you’re working too hard on a hopeless case.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Cora said. “You run that license plate for me?”

“Yes, I did. And I don’t want you to think it sets any precedents. I didn’t do it because I think there’s anything to it. I didn’t do it because I think it’s a valuable lead. I didn’t do it because I think it has anything to do with Darryl Daigue. I did it largely so you would leave me alone. The fact you’re back already is not encouraging. It makes me think maybe I wasn’t negative enough. Is there any way I can impress upon you how worthless I think the information I am about to give you is?”

“I don’t know, Chief. That would depend largely on whether the license plate you ran happens to be registered to a Ms. Cindy Tambourine.”

Chief Harper’s mouth fell open. “How in the
world
did you figure that?”

Cora shrugged, smiled modestly. “Just a lucky guess.”

“Not that lucky,” Chief Harper told her dryly. “According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, that car is registered to a Miss Valerie Thompkins, of Danbury, Connecticut. Ms. Thompkins is a widow—her maiden name is Thompkins, by the way, her married name was Fleckstein—and she has no connection with either Anita Dryer or Darryl Daigue whatsoever.”

“Can you Google me some people?”

Sherry looked up from the pumpkin she was carving. She’d taken the top off and was scooping out the seeds with her hands. “Cora, I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

“You’re making a jack-o’-lantern?”

“Tomorrow’s Halloween.”

“Already?” Cora said. “Gee, time flies when you’re having fun.”

“Where have you been?”

“The library, mostly. And if that isn’t a place to drive you wild! You can’t eat, you can’t drink, you can’t smoke. You can’t talk. Damn lucky there’s stuff to read. A person could go batty there.”

“You want me to Google someone you met in the library?”

“Someone I read about in the library. And someone I didn’t.”

“Cora, didn’t I show you how to Google?”

“Yeah, you did. If I knew which icon to click I could probably do it.”

“Just keep clicking till you hit it.”

“Oh, no. I’m not opening your programs. I can’t close ’em. Some of them are fine. But some of them say, ‘Would you like to save so-and-so?’ And I don’t wanna delete your program by saying no. But if I say yes, it asks me to do something else stupid, like slip in a disk. Or enter some password. Or promise it my firstborn child, not that that’s gonna happen, knock on wood. I had a stressful day, I don’t need some computer talking back to me too.”

“Who do you want to Google?”

“One of them’s Cindy Tambourine. She was Darryl Daigue’s girlfriend.”

“Who’s the other?”

Cora dug out her notepad. “Valerie Thompkins.”

“What’s her connection to the case?”

“She doesn’t have one.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Cora said irritably.

“Okay.” Sherry picked up a big spoon, began scraping the bottom of the pumpkin.

After a few moments Cora said, “Someone might have followed me today.”

“ ‘Might have’?” Sherry said, spooning out seeds.

Cora told Sherry about the black sedan.

“You traced the wrong license plate, and now you’d like to Google it?”

“Just because Chief Harper says it’s wrong doesn’t mean it’s wrong. What does he know?”

“Yeah, he’s just the chief of police,” Sherry said.

“You know what I mean. Just because Harper can’t find a connection doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

“Uh-huh. But you personally think it’s the wrong car?”

“More than likely.”

“So why don’t you find the right one?”

“How?”

“Go back to Danbury, see if it starts following you again. Where did it pick you up?”

“First time I noticed it was when I came out of the doctor’s.”

“Who knew you were going in?”

“The doctor. The cop. The doctor’s receptionist. The woman with the poodle. The one I wanna Google. Good God, did I really say that? I wanna Google the woman with the poodle.”

“And how would the woman with the poodle know you were calling on the doctor?”

“How would
anyone
know I was calling on the doctor? Why would anyone
care
if I was calling on the doctor, unless they happened to kill what’s-his-name. Ricky Gleason. Who wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers, or the transcript, or by anybody else, for that matter. With the possible exception of Darryl Daigue, who claims it could have cleared him, but didn’t manage to pass it on to either the police or his attorney.”

“Well, when you put it that way.”

“How else can I put it? You got a case that doesn’t add up from any angle. You got a sister who’d like to free her big brother, who can’t be freed, and who only came up with this idea after twenty years of not giving a good goddamn. You got a prisoner with the brains of a tree slug, only slightly less appetizing, whose chance of redemption is even lower than that of the Red Sox winning the World Series.”