Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) (11 page)

People always ask that question. Or think it. Or think about thinking it. It’s natural. We’re supposed to know the people around us well enough to spot the little tell-tale signs that they’re deteriorating. Physically, emotionally, mentally, morally. We’re not supposed to
miss it
, whatever
it
is.

Obviously, I’d missed it.

Thing is, if you don’t blindly trust that those around you are trustworthy, you go nuts. Especially when you’re a cop. It’s part of the job to not trust anyone. Doesn’t matter if you’re “only” a very-small-town cop, either. Your job is to be a suspicious pain in the ass. If you can’t turn that off with someone, then what eventually turns off inside you is a hell of a lot more problematic than a faulty light switch.

Now I had to look at the people closest to me the way I looked at someone hunching through Food Mart with a funny bulge tucked into the back of their shirt. Might be a shoplifted bottle of beer. Might be a gun. I had to assume worst case, and work back from that.

So: What to do first?

Aunt Marge had Lieutenant Breeden asking the feds about the offshore account issue. It was a purely unofficial request. They weren’t called in on the original case, it had not yet been proved to cross state lines, and they had (they would imply but not say, as I knew from my own stint in the Bureau) bigger fish to fry. Particularly since I was home safe and sound. But they would have a far better chance of tracking money from the Ellers to anywhere than we ever would. The Eller family had enough attorneys to bog down a county-level request in red tape for years. They could probably even manage to keep the state busy for eighteen months. The feds, however, would be a little harder to put off. We might hear back from them in as little as a month.

In the interest of stealth, Punk went to Harry Rucker. I have no idea what he said to the man, but I knew he’d taken a box of good cigars, presumably to get Harry’s attention. It turned out Chief Rucker never asked for Craig McElroy’s phone records, in a monumental, no,
cosmic
show of incompetence. Harry got to work on the subpoena, “Post haste and sub rosa,” he declaimed to me on the phone. “But it’ll take a week or two, my fair giantess. You know how long it takes to get the phone company to install a line, so you can imagine what it will take to get them to print out a few pieces of paper.”

While we were waiting for those phone records, I wrote a nice little letter to Maury explaining that I was still having some trouble sleeping, and would he mind terribly if Tom continued as acting sheriff? The way Maury ran to my office from his, to smile at me and assure me it was fine by him, told me two things. One was that he was genuinely on my side. The other was that the town council had probably been pushing to replace me entirely. Well, that fit. Of the people on town council besides Maury, only Kim’s father had much liking for me. Camp Brady, being a Brady, had more mean than smart in him. Ruth Campbell, Bobbi’s ex-mother-in-law, never did forgive me for siding with Bobbi in the divorce from Ruth’s no-good knuckle-happy son. Mr. Shiflet of the hardware store was so neutral it was hard to remember he was there.

Then I sat back and lurked.

I am a cop. I am good at lurking.

I have a cat. I am
very
good at lurking.

If you ever want to learn to lurk, watch a cat. Specifically, watch a feral cat. Or, in my case, Boris. He’s black and white. In green shrubbery, he should stick out like a sore thumb. But when he curls up under the azaleas in the spring, all you see is light and shadow. Boris isn’t there. Until some poor bird or chipmunk finds out he is, usually with a small, terminal
squeak
.

I settled in to watch the people around me the way Boris usually watches the world.

No wonder cats are so damn jumpy.

Speak of jumpy: Tom resembled a man dancing barefoot on hot asphalt. Part of that was doing my job, I suppose. It’s not easy being the one to whom the town and indeed, several citizens of the county, address numerous brain-deadening complaints. Like “Why is the speed limit on Turner Gap Road so low? No one drives on it!” or that all-time classic, “Can I shoot trespassers?” (Answers being, respectively, “So no one dies on it,” and “Yes, but only if you want to be arrested.”)

The rest of Tom’s nerves I could lay at Tanya Hartley’s door. They’d been dating for several months, and she was hitting that stage of life where a lack of husband and children was becoming an embarrassment. The few times I saw her around, she was clinging to Tom like a barnacle to a ship’s hull, and he couldn’t scrape her off. He had a slightly wild look behind his eyes around her, one that said he’d be happy enough to try the marriage and kids, but not just now.

In other words, Tom was under pressure. The kind that happens when you keep shaking, gently, a bottle of fizzy beverage. Sooner or later, the cork pops and smacks someone between the eyes.

A man can do some damn stupid things under that kind of pressure. Especially a man who wouldn’t mind buying a nice ring but maybe has qualms about how to also afford the nice house‌—‌say, on Spottswood Lane, the overpriced McMansions built by the Ellers some years back‌—‌and the nice car and the nice clothes that were part of the dream package Tanya Hartley had sold herself with a little help from Madison Avenue.

All of which is easy to tell you, but if you want to see it for yourself, consider this little vignette the day Punk went to see Harry Rucker.

Deborah Rush, the retired lady who keeps house for the two reverends, called in with a complaint about Eddie Brady. This was normal. We get at least one of those calls a week about Eddie. Tom, however, slammed down the telephone, slammed on his hat, and slammed the door on his way out, with a word that I’d never expected him to use in female company. I was ostensibly finishing on my paperwork from a domestic dispute at the Elk Creek Apartments, and kept my head down, but Kim huffed. “What’s wrong with
him
?”

Twenty minutes later, Tom was back, with Eddie Brady in tow. In cuffs. Sporting a red mark on his forehead.

Enough’s enough. I was lurking, not dead. I got to my feet and said in a fair imitation of Aunt Marge, “How did that happen?”

“He wouldn’t put his damn head down,” snapped Tom, “that’s what happened.”

I narrowed my eyes. Boris picked up on my mood and started lashing his tail. “A word with you,” I said.

We went into the lunchroom, which gave us at least an illusion of privacy. “He didn’t get his head down or you didn’t give him a chance to?”

Tom bristled, but his face went dark brick red. “You know how he is, and besides, your cat tore him up and no one said a thing.”

“I wasn’t arresting him when it happened,” I reminded Tom a little stiffly. “Look, if it’s getting on you, I’ll step back up.”

Tom snapped at me a second time. “I can do the job!”

I grabbed his arm and lowered my voice. “If it’s not the job, what is it, then? You’re as bad as Boris at the vet’s.”

He pulled his arm free, but gently. His color ebbed. “I just never get a minute to breathe these days. I’ll be all right.”

I took a risk. “Tanya pushing to move in?”

He twitched, but shrugged. That meant she was, but he hadn’t decided what to tell her about it. I went back to my desk, and I was the one who called Dr. Hartley over to look at Eddie’s head. Not that the years of boozing had left much in the way of brains to damage, but better safe than sued.

I put Aunt Marge in charge of finding out from the church lady mafia if Tom had been enquiring about bigger places to live, or if the Hartleys suspected their daughter of moving in with her boyfriend anytime soon. We’d agreed she wouldn’t spy on Roger, but everyone else was fair game as far as she was concerned. “If they colluded in this crime,” she told me austerely while Roger painted in his studio, “they deserve whatever comes.”

Good enough for me. I let her work out her anxiety by doing her Master Spider routine on the gossip web. Pluck a thread here, a thread there, and see what vibrations come back. It’s a talent I lack that she and Bobbi own in abundance.

Speak of Bobbi: another nervous wreck. Impending motherhood had her shaking in her newly sensible shoes. She’d hit her second trimester and didn’t really like it. “First I couldn’t smell anything without wanting to vomit,” she told me when I went over one evening, “now I can’t smell anything at all, it’s like my nose went on strike.” She scowled, before adding in a now-typical non sequitir, “Do you know it’s an average cost of over two hundred thousand dollars to raise a child nowadays?”

And here I was complaining about the cost of the canned salmon and tuna I bought for Boris. “C’mon, you’ll be fine. You know all a kid really needs is love and the basics.”

“I know, and I know we have plenty of money…” she stopped cold, turned pink. I pretended not to get a sinking feeling in my gut. Since when did Bobbi have plenty of money? Or Raj? A vet around here makes a living, not a great big fabulous living.

I pasted on a smile and retrieved Boris from her recliner. “You’ve just got the jitters,” I said honestly enough. “So what’s the latest?”

She shrugged moodily and started to curl a strand of hair around one finger, and began to pluck at it with her other hand. “Oh, it’s all the same. Old biddies and young idiots, you know how it is.”

I’ve known her since we were still figuring out how to write in cursive. When she does that little hair-curling trick, she’s lying. I decided to see just what she was lying about, with one eye on Boris’s tail. “I know it’s not polite to ask, but are you worried about money?”

“No,” she said, and Boris’s tail stayed still.

I tried to joke, “You have enough to raise a child at a cost of ten thousand a year for the first twenty-one years?”

She didn’t meet my eyes, but she said, “We’re fine for money,” and Boris’s tail again remained still.

I took a shot in the dark. “Is it Ruth?”

She shook her head.

I tried Raj. No, all well there. The salon? Nope. Her in-laws, who were hoping for a grandchild to be raised Hindu? No, she had that under control. I finally gave up. As we were leaving, Bobbi hugged me. “Sorry I’m in a lousy mood, Lil. I really
am
glad you came over.”

That time, Boris’s tail twitched twice.

***^***

With all that spinning around in my head, I tackled Roger. Not directly. That’d be suicide. I watched him from a safe distance. His days were as routine as anyone else’s. Get up, eat breakfast, take a nice long walk with Aunt Marge, spend the morning at the animal shelter, come home and paint or fuss in the garden getting ready for spring. Once a week he would spend a day up in Charlottesville to see his two adult children, shop for art supplies, and take his completed works around the various small galleries. His watercolors had a very peculiar quality to them, somewhere between Chinese calligraphy and mapmaking.

For my Charlottesville skulk, I left Boris at home. He was not happy about it, but he attracted too much attention.

First Roger had coffee on the downtown pedestrian mall with his daughter. She had brought her little son, whom to my knowledge Aunt Marge had never met. Roger’s children persisted in the amusing belief that Aunt Marge was a seductive home-wrecker.

Then Roger went to an art supply store. After that, he wandered through a little art center. I was getting pretty bored by the time he met up with his adult son for lunch back on the downtown pedestrian mall. The son’s wife came along. Something about her tugged at my brain. She was familiar, though I knew I’d never met her. The shape of her face, the set of her eyes‌—‌I knew them somehow, from somewhere.

I took a discreet photo with my cell phone, which worked out very poorly because I am a lousy photographer even with a good camera, and followed Roger discreetly enough to three appointments with people who seemed to own galleries or want to do something with his artwork. Maybe talk about it. I didn’t get that close.

We were homeward bound when Roger turned in to a gas station one county up. I rolled onward. I didn’t need to gas up the car, and I wanted to get home before Boris chewed through the walls.

I’d almost won forgiveness with fancy liver treats when someone knocked on my door. I left Boris growling with his face buried in his food dish, and peeped out the window. I blushed when I saw Roger’s car. Damn. I should’ve known he’d spot me. I don’t know what he did in the military, but he’d been good at it.

I answered the door when I had gotten my color back to more-or-less normal. “Hey, Roger,” I said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

Roger stepped into my little living room. His face was normally pleasant, but right then it was more like a memory of pleasant. He did not take off his coat. Oh boy.

He didn’t meet my gaze. Well, I am taller.

“Spare yourself the trouble, Lil,” he said. His voice was honed to a very fine slicing edge. “I spotted you around two o’clock.”

I sighed. “Crap,” I said. “Well, at least it took till two.”

He didn’t smile. “You were there all day?”

“Pretty much,” I admitted. I made sure to get my kitchen island between us. Roger has always given me the impression he is capable of killing someone with a toothpick and a rubber band.

“Then I
am
a suspect. I knew Marge was lying.”

Poor Aunt Marge. Well, she was off the hook now. I’d taken her place.

No wonder worms squirm.

“Sorry,” I offered insincerely.

Roger huffed. He puffed. Then he smacked his hands together. Boris, who’d belatedly clued in to his presence, jumped about three feet in the air with his tail fluffed out.

“Fine. Well, you’ll figure it out soon enough.” He raised his eyes to mine, and for once, mine weren’t the coldest in the room. “My son’s wife is a McElroy. Jean McElroy. Two years younger than her brother, the late Craig McElroy.”

Funny how I couldn’t get any body parts to work. Finally my mouth said, “Oh.”

“I suppose it’s pointless to tell you I wasn’t involved, what with the family connection.”

I opted for an abysmally tactless, “It sure doesn’t help your case.”