Death Climbs a Tree (19 page)

“Well…”

“That's what I thought. So why are you glad I called?”

“I'm always glad; you know that.” There was the flirting he'd missed at first. “But I've been wondering about old Bert. The way people talk about him, it occurred to me that he might be your man.”

“Old Bert? How old?”

“That was a figure of speech. He might be my age. Maybe not. Why?”

Joan was forty-three, almost forty-four.

“Humor me. What does he look like?”

“When he's not throwing a tantrum, you mean? Pretty average. Average height and build, hair about like mine.” Medium brown, in other words. “I didn't notice his eyes. He needs a haircut, but he was clean. Needs a dentist, too—poor people often do.”

“If you can, find out how long he's lived around here.”

“You know something.” It wasn't a question.

“Maybe. And Joan, don't talk about it. Just find out what you can. Get other people to talk.”

“I'm good at that. Annie's my best source.”

“And tell me more about Skirv. How old would you say he is?”

“I have no idea,” she said promptly. “He has that weather-beaten look that makes it hard to tell.”

“Younger than Andrew?”

“Oh, I don't think so. And probably not as old as you.”

So, between midtwenties and late forties. “Is he tall? Short?”

“Sort of average. But thin. So's his hair, but he ties it back in a ponytail, and he wears a mustache.”

“Good enough.” And Ketcham said he'd been out of town for about ten years.

As usual, she wasn't pushing him. He knew some cops whose wives chafed at being left out of what they were working on. Maybe it was those years as a minister's wife that had prepared her. He didn't know. Or maybe the minister was lucky from the beginning, too.

“Thanks, Joan.” He hung up and told Ketcham where he was going.

“You want me to come along?”

“No, I'll just stroll over to pick up whatever Sylvia left in the tree.”

Unlike Joan, he needed to drive to work. When he got the chance to walk during the day, he grabbed it. Skirv's Stuff was only a few blocks from the police station, on a side street near the campus. Ready to poison young minds, Fred thought. Or help kids find bedspreads with pizzazz. A collection of bright cotton spreads flapped in the sunshine outside the store. Tie-dyed, some of them, and batiks and colorful Indian prints, probably made in China these days. The selection would increase, he knew, when the new crop of students arrived in the fall.

The window was filled with a motley assortment of antiques, collectibles, and just plain junk. Mostly junk, he thought, but he could see the appeal of a worn wooden rocking horse, an almost hairless doll in a wicker buggy, and a beaded Indian headdress, genuine or not. A layer of dust suggested that they were window dressing, not merchandise Skirv ever expected to unload.

In the dim light inside the store, he had no trouble recognizing the man from Joan's description. His drooping mustache as thin as his hair, Skirv stood behind an old-fashioned glass counter framed in oak. Incense burning on the counter didn't succeed in disguising an illegal smell that didn't interest him at the moment.

“Help you?” Right size, and his eyes were brown.

“Mr. Skirvin? Lieutenant Fred Lundquist.” He showed his shield.

Skirv tensed but stood his ground, his hands spread on the counter.

“Andrew Spencer said you were good enough to rescue Sylvia Purcell's belongings when he took her place.” Fred could see the man relax his guard ever so slightly. “Do you still have them?”

“Sure. They're in the back. I didn't know what to do with them when I heard…” He called into a room behind a curtain that looked like one of his Indian bedspreads, “Paul, bring out that bag of stuff from the tree sitter.” Turning back to Fred, he said, “Poor girl. Did they ever find out who did it?”

“We haven't given up yet.”

“I hope you get the bastard. I mean, she was helpless up there. No way to defend herself. How's Andrew doing? He seems like a good kid.”

“All right, far as I know.”

“You know his mom manages the orchestra? That's how I knew Sylvia, from the orchestra. God, it sounds awful to say knew.”

“How close were you?”

“We weren't. But you had to respect what she was doing.”

The bedspread curtain behind him opened, and a teenager even thinner than Skirv himself—his son?—appeared with a black plastic garbage bag slung over his shoulder.

“Give it to him,” Skirv said, making no move to touch the bag. “Or better yet, why don't you carry it out to his car?”

“I left my car at the police station,” Fred said.

“No problem,” Skirv said. “He can walk over there.”

Damn, he'd hoped to see Skirv touch it. The man was bare-handed, even touching the glass counter, but Fred had no grounds on which to lift prints from the counter. Odds were good he'd used gloves when he brought the stuff back. It would have been perfectly natural.

Fred looked around for something he might conceivably be interested in buying, something that would take a fingerprint. That glass paperweight over there, maybe, the globe with the miniature snowman and children inside. He peered at it.

“You interested in something?” Skirv asked.

“My mom collects those things,” he lied. “You shake it and it snows, right?”

“Sure. Go ahead; try it.”

Reaching for it, Fred managed to knock it off the table crammed with junk he knew his mother would never have in her house. “Sorry! I hope I didn't break it.”

“Doesn't look like it,” Skirv said. He leaned over the counter but made no attempt to pick the globe up.

Fred bent down. “Guess not. Shook up the snow, though. How much you want for it?”

“There's a sticker on the bottom,” Skirv said helpfully, still keeping his hands to himself.

Fred resigned himself to picking the thing up. Holding it by the edges of the bottom, he upended it. “Twenty bucks. That's pretty steep.”

Skirv shrugged. “There's a market for those things.”

“I suppose so, but I don't think Mom would want me to pay that much. How about a glass vase? Or something crystal? She's big on those things, too. She likes milk glass.”

Skirv waved at the table the paperweight had come from. “What you see is what we've got.” The voice was friendly enough, but no way was Skirv going to hand sell anything to a cop. Meanwhile, young Paul stood holding Sylvia's bag.

Fred gave up. He'd have to send over someone whose demeanor didn't scream cop. Jill Root in plainclothes could pass for an undergrad if Skirv didn't know her, and she could probably pull it off, if she didn't take Kevin along. Maybe Joan—Skirv obviously had no idea she was his wife. He could send Jill with her, to preserve the chain of evidence. At the moment, he thought, Skirv was looking very good for it. And Joan had put him out there on Sunday. With his guard down, he might just give them what they needed.

“Thanks, anyway. And thanks for dealing with this. I'll tell Sylvia's sister.” He could smell the mildew through the bag. No wonder, closed up in there for days. Unlikely they'd find anything useful, but as soon as the boy left, he'd get someone to take it into the station. “Okay, son, let's go.”

19

Some time later, Joan was thinking about Fred's call. No question about it, he knew something. Asking how old Bert and Skirv were had to mean that he suspected someone in a particular age bracket. But why would that be the only thing he'd know about the man? He must be thinking of a man—he'd asked about Bert but not about his wife. Of course, she'd already told him about Bert's temper. But why had he asked about Matt Skirvin? Did he think Skirv had some underhanded reason to take Sylvia's things when Andrew went up the tree? Why would her killer want to be bothered with her stuff?

She'd met Matt out at the woods the day Vint was killed. Was his visit to Andrew window dressing, an alibi, in case someone connected him to Vint? But if jealousy wasn't his motive, why would he have it in for Sylvia and the DNR man?

“Good job, partner!” At the bridge table, Ora congratulated Berta on making four hearts. “You saw right through them.”

Joan smiled her own congratulations, but her thoughts kept racing.

Had Sylvia seen something from her platform? Was that why she was killed? Was her killer afraid she'd left some evidence that could get him in trouble? If Skirv had killed her, he would have disposed of anything incriminating. A stone, maybe, if one had landed on the platform, and if he'd spotted it, of course. But if he was innocent, he might unwittingly have preserved evidence that would help find the man who had done it. She wished she could go along with Fred when he found out.

Skirv had volunteered for Sylvia and then for Andrew. Had he done it to get close to them? So they wouldn't notice him if he came near enough to hurt them?

Looking out her office window, she watched Bert, who seemed to be doing a workmanlike job on the railings. Briefly, he stopped scraping rust to greet someone coming to the center. But when the person—Joan couldn't see who it was—stayed to chat, Bert went back to work. He wasn't slacking off. Maybe hiring him would work, at that.

The door opened, and the person Bert had been talking to turned out to be Fred. Annie Jordan, still folding newsletters, greeted him. “She's in her office—the door's open. You making any progress on what happened to Sylvia Purcell, poor dear? We've all been talking about Herschel Vint, too.”

“I'm glad to see you.” Joan raised her face for his kiss. “You came to look Bert over for yourself?”

He closed the door. “That's one reason.”

“Whaddya think?”

“Seems like a nice enough guy.”

“You should have seen him a while ago.”

“So you said. How about I take you out for an early lunch?”

She looked at the clock. Not so early at that. “Why not? I'll tell the cooks I'm not staying, after all.”

He followed her out of the office, and she could hear him pumping Annie and Mabel about Herschel Vint. Not that they'd have much to tell him.

Eventually, when they were outdoors and out of earshot, Fred came back to the subject of Bert.

“Ask him to give you that can of paint he's been using when it's empty.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Tell him I need to keep track of what he's used?”

“You can come up with something better than that. And pick it up by the bail.”

“It's too small to have a bail.” They didn't put wire handles on little cans.

“Fine. Just keep your fingers off the sides.”

She finally got it. “You want his fingerprints. But all kinds of people have handled it.”

“That's all right, as long as the prints on top are clear. We're not trying to find out which prints are his.”

“Then why bother?”

“We've identified the prints we took from Vint's car, and they match the partial prints on the stone you found. If we don't find a match, I'm not going to worry much about Bert.”

“If you've identified them, then you already know who it is. Am I missing something?”

“We've never heard of this man. But he could be using a phony ID now, or maybe he did when he was picked up years ago.”

“Don't you have a picture?”

“It's damaged. No help at all. But you'll be interested to know that he was arrested in Michigan, up north, and near Lake Michigan.”

“So that's why he'd have Petoskey stones. And use them so casually—he didn't have to buy them in a rock shop.”

“We don't know how long he was there, but from the age they have on record up in Benzie County, he'd be forty by now.”

It wasn't much to go on. “And Bert looks like him?”

“Right size, right age. Could be. So could your friend Skirv. He doesn't know about you and me, does he?”

“Probably not.”

“Good.”

She kept her mouth shut, but it wasn't easy. They arrived at Wilma's Café then and would have had to stop talking about the case anyway. Even in Fred's favorite booth, where he could sit against the back wall and see everyone who came in, it was never safe to speak freely in a town the size of Oliver. The people they didn't recognize were bound to be related to or friends of anyone they mentioned.

She watched him scan the room, most of which was behind her. “You'd do better to bring Ketcham along,” she told him. “He knows everyone.”

His eyes crinkled, melting her. “I'd rather look at you.”

Wilma appeared at Joan's elbow with a coffeepot and an order pad. She set the pot down on the table. “Hi, there. Take your order?”

“My usual,” Fred said.

She nodded.

“What's Fred having?” Joan asked.

Wilma rattled it off. “Half-pound burger with fries, coffee, and apple pie à la mode.”

Knowing Wilma's juicy burgers, she was tempted, but thought better of it, even if she could have eaten all that. There was a lot more of Fred than of her to feed, and she hoped to keep it that way. “Give me a BLT on whole wheat toast, please, Wilma, light on the mayo. And coffee.”

“Got it,” Wilma said, scribbling on the pad. She poured the coffee and disappeared. One of the reasons they'd have kept coming back even if Oliver had more restaurants was never to listen to specials of the day, much less to a kid in a bow tie say, “I'm Jeremy, and I'll be your server today. What can I get you guys to drink while you look at the menu?” After which, of course, he would vanish.

The food arrived in less time than Jeremy or Justin or whoever would have taken to bring them coffee. Joan's BLT stood tall, and Fred's burger with lettuce and slices of onion and tomato overlapped its huge sesame bun. He slathered mustard on it.