Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 03 - When the Carny Comes to Town (12 page)

He stood and walked to the sliding door and let Miss Piggy in.  “You and Madge didn’t think that odd?”

“What was odd was that she was still in town.  I saw her at the Budget Inn.”

“What were you doing…?  Oh, the carnies stay there.”  He thought for a few seconds.  “Penny and the carnies.”

“Coincidence you think?”

“Can’t be,” he said.  “But why would she leave stuff here?”

I shrugged.  “She had some other clothes.  When I saw her Tuesday morning she had changed into something nicer.”

“Nicer that her usual, or really nice?”

I considered this.  “Really nice, blue pantsuit.”

“So,” he said.  “Penny got some money.”

“Maybe she was staying with someone who worked at the carnival.”

“She could have, when they were here, anyway.”  Aunt Madge walked through the kitchen door.

“Why do you say that?”  George asked more politely than he talked to me.

Aunt Madge put two tea mugs in the sink and walked to us.  “She used to occasionally work at the carnivals when they came through the area.  Sold tickets to the rides.”

“You forgot to mention that earlier,” I said, trying hard not to sound critical.

She shrugged.  “Hadn’t thought much about Penny in years.  She was better known for being in the Sandpiper a lot.”

George tucked his pencil stub back into the spiral of his notebook.  “It doesn’t make sense that she was in the motel but had her stuff there.”

I gave him a look that I hoped said “you’re kidding.”  Out loud, I added, “You knew her longer than I did.  Did she strike you as somebody who always made sense?”

I stayed on the sofa while George let himself out through the small back yard.  Mister Rogers came in as he left and trotted over to see if I was in possession of dog treats.  I stroked him absently, thinking.

Where had she been since I saw her at the Budget Inn
on Tuesday and today?

Aunt Madge interrupted my thoughts.  “I didn’t want to talk to George until I talked to you, so I gave him a cup of tea and said I’d be back.”  She sat next to me on the sofa.  “How is Adam?”

“Could be worse.”

AND IT WAS.  I tried to talk to Scoobie when I went back at seven, but he answered in monosyllables and asked me to turn on the TV. 

I left after about twenty minutes and said I’d be back late morning on Friday, unless he called my cell and said not to come.  He just nodded.

I APPRAISED A HOUSE in the popsicle district Friday morning and when I got to the hospital just before lunch it was as if Sgt. Morehouse hadn’t given Scoobie the news about his mother.  He had a steno pad on the wheeled tray in front of him, though on it were mostly doodles and a few single words in a list.  I carefully avoided looking at the pad.

“Would you see if the little kitchen up here has chocolate milk?” he asked, as I sat down my purse.

I came back from the patient kitchen with the milk, already opened and with a straw.  “I’m not talking to you about it, but you know I’m around if you want to talk, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”  He held the milk even with his mouth and stuck the straw across his neck collar.  “Hadn’t seen her in years.  I’m trying to be glad she’s gone without wishing her dead.  I’ve wished that a lot, but it’s kind of pointless now.”

I wasn’t sure if he thought that was funny, so all I did was nod.  When he didn’t say more I picked up the remote and turned to a rerun of “Murder She Wrote.”  We’d watched MASH the afternoon before, but Scoobie said he had enough needles on his own.

We didn’t talk, and my thoughts kept returning to Penny.  I realized I didn’t know when she actually died, only that her body was found early Thursday.  I wondered if I could have been one of the last people to see her alive. 

BECAUSE SCOOBIE’S MOTHER was found a couple miles north of Ocean Alley, there was just a short note about her death on the inside page of the Ocean Alley Press.  There was no mention that she was Scoobie’s mother, and I figured Scoobie had George to thank for that.  I did get to learn her last name, though.  It was Pittsen.  I’d never heard of that name.

“Because she made it up,” Morehouse said.  He was at the B&B late Friday afternoon, about to go through Penny’s suitcase.

“Who makes up a name?” I asked.

“Somebody who gets out of Taconic Women’s Correctional Facility in upstate New York and doesn’t want to use one of her prior names when she starts stealing stuff and forging checks again.”

Sgt. Morehouse pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

“Why are you wearing gloves?” I asked.  “You think the stuff in her suitcase has something to do with her death?”

“You saw her, would you touch her stuff without gloves?” he asked.  He was carefully putting her makeup in separate plastic bags.  “Might have fingerprints besides just hers,” he said, in answer to my questioning look.

The suitcase was sitting on Aunt Madge’s oak kitchen table and she was standing a few feet away, arms folded.  She had told Sgt. Morehouse she went through the suitcase, and he was grouchy about it, so she’d gone into her bedroom for a few minutes and then come back.  “Do you see much besides the pot?” she asked.

“Nope.  Just trying to cover all the bases,” he said, cramming Penny’s clothes back into the suitcase.  I was struck by the fact that she had no books.  Scoobie is usually reading two or three at the same time.

“Don’t forget the smaller bag that was in the closet,” she said, as it looked as if Morehouse was readying to leave. 

“Oh yeah.”  He reached down to the chair on which she had placed it.  “Heavy sucker.  What’s in it?”

“Locked,” Aunt Madge said.

“I thought you said you didn’t look because she had clothes over it so you figured it was more private,” I said.

She shrugged and we both watched as Morehouse picked the tiny lock with the small pocket knife on the end of a pair of nail clippers.

“We’ll just see what was so all-fired…” he stopped.

The small bag was full of sterling silverware and money.  Lots of money.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“THAT’S WHAT THEY CALL a game changer,” Morehouse said as he stared at the money and silverware.

I kept gazing at the case, unable to stop looking at the fifteen or twenty rubber-banded stacks.  There was a one hundred dollar bill on top of one, fifties and twenties on others.  There was no way to see if each stack was comprised of all the same denomination without looking through them.  I figured Morehouse would cut off my hand and use it for fish bait if I tried.

“It’s real, right?” I asked.

“Do I look like the Secret Service?” he asked.

Aunt Madge walked closer for a better look.  “I can think of a lot of reasons she’d have that, and none of them are good ones.”

“Ya think?”  Morehouse sat on a wooden kitchen chair.  “This I did not expect.”  He was already on his cell phone asking for another officer to help him “with the contents of Penny’s luggage.” 

“When did she get out of prison?” I asked.

“Middle of February,” he said.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if all of us could accumulate cash that fast?” Aunt Madge said.

I looked at Morehouse.  “Burglary and kiting checks, you said she was in for that.”

“Technically receiving stolen property.  I’m thinking she branched out.”

“Who would trust her with this kind of money?” Aunt Madge asked.

“Nobody,” I said, and they both looked at me.  “She’s dead, right?  My guess is she wasn’t supposed to have it.  Or keep it, anyway.”

Morehouse literally shook his finger at me.  “You stay outta this.”

I feigned an injured look.  “You know I always do what you say.”

The doorbell rang and I started for the front door, but Aunt Madge put out a hand.  “I want to let the dogs out before I let anyone else in.”

“I mean it, Jolie,” Morehouse said.

I raised my hands in mock surrender.  “She’s all yours.”

THEY DECIDED NOT TO UNFASTEN the packets of money in Aunt Madge’s kitchen, so it didn’t take long for Morehouse and Lt. Tortino to write and sign a note agreeing to the number of stacks of bills and their height, which they measured with Aunt Madge’s pock-marked wooden tape measure.  Each stack was about a half-inch tall.

“You want me to donate money for you to get a new measuring tape?” Tortino asked her, with a humorous smirk.

“It was Gordon’s,” she said, with no change of expression. 

That shut them up.  Uncle Gordon’s been dead more than twenty years.

I walked them to the front door.  When I got back to the kitchen Aunt Madge was sitting at her oak table, hands in her lap, doing nothing.  She had not even turned up the lever on the electric tea kettle, so I did, and sat in a chair at the head of the table so I could face her.

“You okay?”

She shook her head.  “Someone killed her, probably looking for that money.  They could have come here looking for it.”

I nodded.  “Guess they didn’t know she stayed here that night.  Cozy Corner is a little beyond her usual price range.”  I was trying to get Aunt Madge to look less worried, but it didn’t help.

Both dogs barked and I looked toward the sliding glass door.  Jazz was strutting back and forth in front of it, as if to emphasize she was in and they were out.  I let them in.  Aunt Madge’s phone rang and she answered, saying only “hello” and “I’ll tell her.”

She looked at me.  “Sgt. Morehouse says he assumes we know not to talk about the money.”

As if.

NOW THAT WE KNEW Penny had all that money there was no pretending, as I had tried to do, that her death was random.  I didn’t give a damn about Penny, but I was nervous about what finding this out would mean for Scoobie. 

I put it out of my mind as I pulled in front of Harry Steele’s Victorian home early Friday evening.  I hadn’t been there but once since last Saturday, and was stopping by on my way back to the hospital.  Last fall Harry had replaced some boards on the front porch and he had been trying to get the paint he put on them to turn out the same color as the paint he put on older boards.  This spring he apparently had gotten over that desire, as the porch and first story were all freshly painted a dark green, with slight color variations in a few places.  It looked as if the paint stopped at the point Harry could reach standing on a ladder.

Harry’s house had not been as well cared for through the years as Aunt Madge’s.  She repaints hers every three years, white with blue trim and shutters.  Harry’s grandparents had owned his place, but it had had other owners for more than twenty years when he bought it.  They had divided it into three apartments and the last owner had taken as much care of it as slum landlords take care of inner-city duplexes.  H
arry says, quite proudly, that
he bought it “just in time to save it.”  I’d have razed it, but he has put on a new roof and hung drywall throughout.  Only the first floor looks really good, but he says he’s in no hurry.

I let myself in the side door nearest to the large first-floor office he and I share and hollered as I walked in.  I heard him yell that he’d be down in a minute, so I walked to the pile of files that represented appraisals yet to be done.  It’s usually only one or two deep, as I grab them pretty fast.  Harry pays me half of what he gets as the appraisal fee, and he doesn’t mind if I do most of them.  Since I hadn’t done but one for a week there were four files.

Two were from the popsicle district, courtesy of Lester; one was a multi-unit rental on C Street, and the other a larger single family home about 20 minutes north of town.  A note on the folder said it was the home of the son of one of Harry’s college buddies.  I studied that one first.  Manasquan was on the way to Asbury Park, almost at the halfway point between Ocean Alley and Asbury Park.  I wouldn’t have to explain why I was heading out of town.  As a matter of basic courtesy I usually tell Aunt Madge my plans for a day.  I’m not saying I’m always one-hundred percent truthful, but I do live under her roof.  For free.

“Hey, Jolie.”  Harry looked as if he’d been painting.  He had a large butcher-type apron, which had several colors of paint on it, over a pair of cotton pants and a long-sleeve tee-shirt.  “I’m really glad to hear Scoobie is doing better.”

“He got your card.  That was nice of you.”  Harry had stuck two tens in the card with a note that said “in case hospital food gets to you.”  I could tell Scoobie was mildly offended at first, but then he had grinned and said if I took money from Harry he could, too, and he stuck the bills in a book. 

“You sure you can do this?” he asked as he finished wiping his hands on a paper towel and threw it in a waste basket.  “I was about to do a couple of those, but I’d rather keep painting.”

“Yep.  I think I’ll do a couple of the in-town ones next week and maybe do the one in Manasquan tomorrow, if that’s okay.”  Because the carnival will be open on Saturday.

“Sure, as long as that’s okay with the clients.  None of the settlements are for at least a month.”