Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) (7 page)

My cell phone rang. The one good thing about the Ellers and Littlepages keeping a presence in Crazy is that we have a lot of infrastructure you don’t see in other tiny towns like this. High-speed wireless internet. A huge, I mean
huge
, dish system to provide cable television. Enough cell phone towers that we get consistent coverage in most of the county.

Okay, that last part is
mostly
good.

I pulled over before I answered the phone. We have a law in town about not talking on the cell phone while driving. I try to obey it. Law enforcement loses credibility if they have to write themselves tickets.

The call was from Aunt Marge. “I was thinking,” she told me, “it would be a good idea if you made your thank-yous in person.”

I felt six years old again, being told to eat the lima beans I hated. “Do I have to?”

“It’s appropriate.”

I growled to myself. The Turners didn’t run out of money after World War Two, though they certainly lived in reduced circumstances, and they’d sent Aunt Marge to a very good finishing school in Europe. That’s where she and my mother met and became best friends, though they’d both been born and more or less raised in Crazy. I wondered if my mother would’ve been this set on protocol. Knowing my luck, she’d have been worse.

“They didn’t do it for me,” I pointed out. “They did it because the PR would’ve been bad, and the money’s insured.”

“They did it,” said Aunt Marge firmly. “Their motives are irrelevant, Lil. You have to thank them properly.”

I growled out loud this time. “I am
not
baking them bread or cookies!” Another thought occurred. “And I’m not taking a fruit basket, either!”

“Your presence will do,” replied Aunt Marge. I knew that tone. I’d have better luck getting the creek to flow uphill than I would changing Aunt Marge’s mind.

“Fine,” I snapped, like I was fifteen again. “I’ll go. But I’m going in uniform.”

“That’s fine, dear.”

I hung up before she could tell me to mind my manners. Aunt Marge dresses in either floaty cotton skirts or age-appropriate slacks and tops, and to look at her, you’d never guess two things about her. One is her age. The second is her ability to run things her own way. The woman’s a tyrant. A genteel one, but a tyrant nonetheless.

I turned the car around and headed for Eller Lane.

***^***

The Littlepage mansion always reminds me of the big houses in
Gone With the Wind
. The Eller place is more colonial, and would make a pretty good high school for size. There’s a very antebellum feel to both places, with quarters for the hired help kept discreetly out of sight of the main house, and lots of planted beds of flowers and manicured paths. You need a golf cart to get around either one. I reckon riding out on horseback to inspect the peasants is passé.

The gate guard had the sense to let me through without phoning the big house first. That was new. I wondered if it was due to the circumstances, or a lingering side effect from Punk’s bribe. Either way, he’d called the big house right after letting me through, because Uncle Eller was, as he always did on the rare occasion I came up here, waiting on the porch. Probably to make sure I didn’t contaminate the house with my Littlepage blood.

He was wearing a wool overcoat, something more suited to London than January in the Virginia mountains. My cousin Robert stood just behind and beside him, wearing an expensive ski parka. From the zipper dangled the lift tag from Wintergreen, the resort up the road a ways.

Ellers and Littlepages have distinct looks to them. Littlepages are stocky, average height, with mousy-fair hair and extremely pale eyes, and a decent enough complexion. They look in general like the kind of people who play a lot of tennis, and enjoy boring other people with stories about their time in Paris or Vienna. Ellers are tall, lean, dark-haired, and saturnine, by which I mean morose. Both families are good-looking, though that’s less nature and more the relentless application of high-end health care from birth. Both are, as a rule, snobby as all get-out. Still, the Ellers could win prizes for the way they look down those long noses of theirs.

I kept Boris in the car. He hates the cold, and the Ellers aren’t animal people. Unless they’re shooting them to stick them on a wall.

“Good afternoon,” said Uncle Eller. Robert Eller Senior, to be precise. My father’s brother. I’ve only got a few photographs of my parents, and it comforts me to think that in each one, my father smiles. I’m pretty sure Uncle Eller doesn’t know how.

“Good afternoon,” echoed Cousin Robert. He’s a pretty good copy of Uncle Eller, but there’s some softness around the angles of his face. Of course, as Aunt Marge would point out, his mother
is
a Fleming, and they’ve all got a buttery look about them.

I tried. I did. I meant to say, “Thank you for paying the ransom.” What came out of my mouth was, “There’s a few questions about what happened.”

Uncle Eller squished up his face to make it clear he’d just encountered a very bad smell: me. “We have answered sufficient inquiries on this matter. It is closed as far as we are concerned.”

Ten million bucks out the window and it was closed? I don’t care if he had insurance, not even an Eller could see that kind of cash fly away without a twitch or two.

The words
courtesy call
dinged in my head. In Aunt Marge’s voice.

My chest and stomach knotted up. I could all but feel Aunt Marge pushing me up the three steps onto the porch. Pardon me,
veranda
. Rich people have verandas. Porches are for the poor.

I went for Cousin Robert. It looked like the soft option. I put out my gloved hand. “Thanks. For paying. Not that it mattered, but thanks.”

He shook my hand lightly. Mannerly of him. “I’m glad it’s all settled.”

It wasn’t settled, but I managed to work up a morsel of tact for once in my life. Aunt Marge would’ve been proud. I even said, “I’m grateful,” without too much visible discomfort. Then I succumbed to my curiosity. “So, how’d you get ten million into an overnight bag?”

Cousin Robert scowled, face reddening. Uncle Eller answered quickly, harshly, “We did not, as you put it, ‘get ten million’. We could provide only a fifth of the ransom in cash.”

“So they let you off the hook for the other eight million?”

Neither Eller answered me. We stood there in the cold January afternoon with the sun bouncing diamond sparks off the snow, and said nothing. I got an unbearable urge to fidget, and fought it down. I had to make one of them blink first.

Uncle Eller gave in. That surprised me. I’d have put my money on Cousin Robert.

“If that’s all, Sheriff?”

“That’s all,” I said, because I knew asking questions was going to get me nowhere. For the moment, anyway. “Uncle. Cousin.”

I turned and headed back to the warm comfort of my cruiser. I spent a moment petting Boris, who was drowsing with his paws crossed over his nose even though the heat was cranked to maximum. Once I felt my irritation ebb, I put the car into gear and drove away.

7.

A
thaw set in, turning the snow to water, and the ground to cold mud. I sat on the couch and drank hot cocoa. Boris had sacked out next to me, a happy little cat-smile on his face, his tummy white and soft and exposed, his legs tucked in and his paws curled. Somewhere in his feline dreams, he was bringing down a bison.

Lucky cat.

I had insomnia.

I’d been getting insomnia off and on since I’d gotten home. I wasn’t surprised. Under the circumstances, to use Dr. Hartley’s phrase. I was having dreams of being cold, and I’d bought a nightlight for the short hallway from my bedroom to the living room and kitchen. I’d even thought about a security system. But mostly I was relying on hot cocoa and time spent staring at home shopping networks. All those exercise and fitness and diet infomercials depress me. Home shopping channels, on the other hand, bore me to sleep in about half an hour flat.

It was a long half-hour.

My brain wanted to spin its wheels all night about how I’d gotten tazered but Boris hadn’t caused mayhem. Had he slept through it? Had he realized too late? I knew I might never know, and that bugged me like a piece of sand in my eye.

Then there was the problem of Shotgun and Tall. Nobody was waving cash around within a ten-county area. And believe me, cash-waving would get noticed. Had they really taken the money and run?

I don’t know why, but I also had trouble believing Tall meant to leave me to die. It would’ve been easier to not leave three cans of soup and the two comforters, for all the good they did me. Given that it’s possible to die of hypothermia in seventy-degree water, it’s not too hard to die of it when you’re in a forty-degree cellar, comforters or not. But why give me the chance if murder was on their minds? They could’ve shot me in the head and dumped me anywhere on those logging roads, and I’d not have turned up till someone tripped over my bones. If I’d ever turned up at all.

Another nagging question. How much money had the Ellers paid? I had no idea, because Steven Clay hadn’t returned my calls. Nor could I be sure he’d tell me a damn thing. They’d paid at least two million, from what Uncle Eller said, but it’s not too often a ransom demand goes down just because you can’t pay the whole thing in cash.

I tried not to think about the Great Bungle, which is how I was referring to the so-called investigation into my abduction.

I also tried not to think about the fact Maury Morse had advised me to let Tom remain acting sheriff for a few more weeks. “Just till you get a bit more settled back in,” he’d told me that afternoon, wringing his baseball cap into a wreck in his hands. The guy’s bald spot had been shiny with sweat, and it hadn’t been from the weather. “You look kinda tired.”

Tired, Aunt Marge has often remarked, is code for “old” or “sick” or, among those attempting tact, “scary”.

Twenty or so minutes into the soft sales patter on stoneware, my brain gave up. I woke up sprawled on the couch with Boris perched by my head. He was grooming himself. Noisily. I felt the rasp of his tongue as he slurped along his leg and caught part of my ear for good measure.

I love my cat, but
ewwww
.

I yawned. I stretched. The light seemed very bright for early morning.

I saw the clock on the shelf, and swore so loudly that Boris put his ears back.

It was ten in the morning.

I stormed into the office fifteen minutes later. I perfected the three-minute shower in college, and any cop knows how to go from bed-head to presentable in the time it takes most people to figure out how to pour their first cup of coffee. The only reason I’d taken as long as I had was Boris’s reluctance to get his paws mussed walking to the car.

There is no cat as fussy as one who used to live out of a dumpster.

I didn’t bother with hellos. “Why the hell didn’t you call me?”

Kim mutely pointed to Tom, sitting at his desk, one of those cheap metal ones that I swear must cost about five dollars to make. I’ve got one, and so does Kim. Only Punk lacks a desk. If we gave him one, there’d be no room for the fold-out sofa where we sleep when we’ve got someone in custody in our cells.

Tom reddened from head to toe, but said calmly, “Punk can take a few extra shifts.”

Boris cradled in my arms, I hollered, “Do I
look
like I can’t handle my job?”

Kim stared at her desk. Tom stared at his hands. Punk turned a strange color but got out, “Well, no, not really.”

I huffed. I sat down. I let Boris go. He hopped onto my desk and lashed his tail at the world. You ever hear someone say, “If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”? Boris had refined it to, “If Momma ain’t happy, someone’s losing an eye.”

My frustration burned my throat. It’d been two weeks and a day since I’d gotten thrown in a trunk, and the jail was empty. Nobody was in custody. We had no solid leads, no solid evidence. For all I knew, Tall and Shotgun were sipping cold beer and chuckling over the ease of getting ten million. I couldn’t even get the K&R insurance guy to return my calls.

Why exactly
did
I come into work?

I’d half-formed an idea of throwing a suitcase in the car and driving down to Florida, someplace quiet on the Gulf maybe, when the telephone rang. Kim fielded it, shutting her emergency chocolate drawer with a quick, guilty look. “Sheriff Department. Oh, hello, Chief. Yes, she’s right here, but she’s…”

I already had my hand out for the phone. Kim walked the handset over to me and mouthed, “Chief Danes.” I smiled a big fake smile and said cheerfully into the phone, “Kurt, how can I help you today?”

“Sheriff, I hate to do this to you.”

When someone uses your title instead of your first name, you know it’s not going to be good.

“We turned up Craig McElroy.”

I put the phone on speaker, and repeated for everyone’s benefit, “You found Craig McElroy? Where?”

“In his truck. Off Wolf Creek Road.” Kurt paused significantly. “He’s been dead a while, Lil. Even with the cold, it ain’t pretty.”

It’s the hell of my job that I knew what he meant. “How long is a while?”

“I’m guessing he lived just about long enough to pick up the money.”

Tom spoke up. “How do you figure?”

The speaker made Kurt’s reply tinny. “There’s an empty leather bag next to the body in the truck. Right next to the shotgun I’m thinking put that big hole in his head.”

***^***

We beat Vernon Rucker to the Wolf Creek Road scene by maybe twenty minutes, thanks to Kurt calling us first. I felt a little queasy when I got out of my cruiser, and for once, Boris stayed right in my arms. He’s a terror in town, but out in the woods, he realizes he’s somebody’s lunch. Punk stuck close, too. He’d napped in the back seat most of the way. Or pretended to. Neither of us had been too happy with Tom ordering him to baby-sit, but it was quicker not to argue.

Kurt reached out and gave Boris a pat on the head that, if Boris hadn’t been so shocked, would’ve gotten his fingers ripped up. “So that’s the famous cat sheriff,” he said, and waved us further up the road. It was all mud and ruts, and on one side, steep drop-off to Wolf Creek. The melt had the creek rushing at a good clip. If the truck had gone over the edge, it would’ve been months before anyone found it or Craig McElroy. But the turn-off was surprisingly wide, and a narrow path led down to the water. Fishing spot was my guess.