Killer Fudge (A Callahan Garrity Short Story) (Callahan Garrity Mysteries) (2 page)

I got up and walked slowly around the room.
The countertops were those of a man who lived alone and liked
things orderly. A toaster, coffeemaker, and cordless phone were
lined up in military fashion. The stove held a copper teakettle and
a small wooden file box. Idly I flipped up the lid. A
grease-spotted index card had a recipe for tomato aspic written in
purple ink in a tiny crabbed handwriting. I closed the
box.

"Your father got on well with
Darius?"

"They were thick as thieves," she said, then
laughed bitterly. "Literally, one might say."

"The police say they found quite a bit of cash
on Darius. Six hundred dollars. Cash he admitted taking from the
house. Was your father in the habit of keeping that much cash
around?"

Caroline pulled nervously at the collar of her
blouse. "Cash? Daddy? I suppose he could have had that much around
the house. Usually he liked to pay for things by check or credit
card. It helped him with his record keeping."

I roamed the small room again, looking for
something the police might have missed. On a wooden chair pushed up
to a small built in desk I spotted a cardboard box. The contents
were a jumble of odds and ends. A small blue and white platter. A
sugar bowl with an unusual hand-painted pattern of bluebirds and
butterflies, a green Depression-glass cake plate, and a pink
tulip-shaped flower vase. McCoy, probably.

"What's all this?" I asked.

She came over to look, find when she saw what
was in the box, she gave a small indignant snort.

"More of Daddy's trash. He went to estate
sales every week and bought a lot of broken old junk. The good
stuff he took to a flea market down by the airport and sold. It's
so humiliating, having your own father paw through dead people's
belongings. And actually selling them." She shuddered. "It's not as
though he needed the money. Dad was retired from IBM."

I looked closer at Caroline Ragan. Her blouse
was real silk, and the slacks she wore were well tailored. She wore
a square-cut amethyst ring on her right hand, and a gold chain
around her neck held a teardrop-shaped diamond pendant. Nice stuff
for an old-maid schoolmarm.

"Are you the only heir?"

She stiffened. "I suppose. Stephen certainly
couldn't inherit."

"Stephen?"

"My brother."

"Why not?"

She was annoyed with me. It happens. "He's
institutionalized. At Atlanta Regional Hospital. He's been there
for fifteen years. Since Mama died. They say he's
schizophrenic."

"Was your brother violent?"

I saw a small muscle twitch in her cheek. "Not
at all. He's very calm as long as he takes his
medication."

I looked again at the back door. "That lock
wasn't forced," I pointed out. "I looked at the front door briefly
when you let me in. It didn't look tampered with either. That means
your father probably let his murderer in here. Is there any chance
Stephen could have gotten out of the hospital and come
here?"

Her face flushed an ugly pink.

“That's impossible. I'd like you to leave now.
Darius Greene killed my father. He's dangerous. An animal. My
father's skull was crushed. Did you know that?"

I let myself out the back door because it was
easier than walking past the wrathful Caroline Ragan.

The backyard was like the rest of the house:
well groomed. The scent of new-mown grass hung in the warm
afternoon air, and there were lawn mower tracks in the grass.
Darius Greene had definitely been here.

A late model white Buick was parked in the
small detached garage. I had a sudden urge to snoop. After glancing
around to see if Caroline was still glaring at me, I walked briskly
up to the car and peeked in the passenger-side window.

Clean as a whistle. No Big Mac wrappers, Diet
Coke cans, or spare pairs of sneakers. Not nothing. I looked around
the garage. Hand tools were hung on pegs over a workbench. Rakes,
shovels, and hedge clippers hung from nails along the rafters. I
ran my fingers along the clipper blades. A couple of still-green
leaves clung to my fingertips.

It wasn't going to be easy to tell Ruby that
her precious grandson might be a murderer.

As I left the garage I glanced again at
Ragan's car. This time my eye caught a flash of something sticking
out from under the passenger's seat. Newsprint.

Quickly I opened the door and peered under the
seat. It was a copy of Thursday’s the newspaper classified ads,
folded in precise quarters, showcasing area garage and yard sales
for the weekend. Four ads were circled in red ink. I dug in my
purse, got out paper and pen, and copied down the addresses. Then I
put the paper back where I'd found it.

I found a pay phone down the street from
Ragan's house. Edna answered on the first ring. "House Mouse." She
sounded bored.

"Mom? Call Atlanta Regional Hospital and ask
about a patient named Stephen Ragan. Find out if there's any way he
could have gotten out of there Thursday. Call me back at this
number."

I'd pulled the van up close to the phone
booth, so I got back in and studied the addresses I'd copied from
Merritt Ragan's newspaper while I waited. The inside of the van was
hot and stuffy. I got out and walked briskly several times up and
down the block, keeping within earshot of the phone. The exercise
was part of my new program.

After thirty minutes of pacing, my blouse was
sweat-soaked and plastered to my back. A kid sat on the porch of a
weather-beaten wooden house across the street. He was staring at
me. I stared back. He pulled out a giant Snickers bar, tore off the
wrapper, and began licking it, slowly and deliberately, like a cat
with a dead mouse. He had chocolate smeared all over his face and
hands. It was in his hair, between his toes probably. I could hear
my own breathing go shallow. Feel the salivary juices trickling
through my chocolate-deprived digestive tract. I wanted to vault
across the street, snatch the Snickers from the kid, and inhale it
all in one gooey chocolate-caramel-peanut-covered nanosecond. It
took every ounce of moral fiber I possessed to go back to the phone
booth and call the house again.

This time it was Ruby who answered the phone.
"Edna had to, uh, go to the, uh, store," she stammered.

"Where is she really, Ruby?" I demanded. She
was too saintly to be an effective liar. "Tell me."

"Lord have mercy, I don't know where she
went," Ruby wailed. "I was sitting here when you called the last
time. She got off the phone, looked up an address in the phone
book, and took off out of here like a scalded dog."

"Never mind," I said. "I'll deal with her
later."

"Callahan, wait," she said. "Did you talk to
Darius?"

"I talked to him, but he wouldn't talk to
me."

Silence.

"There's goodness in that boy. But don't
nobody but me seem to know it. Can you do anything?"

I looked down at the scrap of paper with the
estate sale addresses. "Maybe. What did Merritt Ragan look like? I
only ever talked to him on the phone."

"Skinny little old fella. Reminded me of one
of them bantam roosters. Had a full head of white hair. Little
round bifocal glasses and one of them pointy little chin beards.
What was the name of that man in the children's book? The man that
made the princess spin gold all night till she guessed his name? He
reminded me of him. Can't think of the name myself."

"Rumpelstiltskin?"

"That's the one," she said. "Mr. Ragan looked
just that way."

My scrap of paper was looking like Darius
Greene's last hope. "Go see him, Ruby," I urged. "Maybe he'll talk
to you. Ask him where that money came from. And get him to tell the
truth. It's the only thing that might save him."

"I'll see what I can do," she said
wearily.

* * *

At the first yard sale on the list I had to
elbow my way past a throng of people picking through stacks of old
National Geographic magazines to get into the house. Right inside
the front door I tripped over a metal and plastic contraption and
nearly impaled myself on a set of brass fireplace tongs.

"That's why I'm selling the darned thing,"
said the woman who helped me to my feet. "The commercials make it
look great; ski your way to a thinner you. They don't tell you it
takes up a whole room in your house and you feel like throwing up
after five minutes on it."

She'd said the magic word: thinner. I looked
at the contraption with renewed interest. "Oh. A Nordic Ski-Track.
How much? Does it work?"

"Twenty-five bucks," she said quickly. "I'll
get my son to load it in the car for you."

I looked closer at the woman. She was two
inches shorter and thirty pounds heavier than me. "I'll pass," I
said. I described Merritt Ragan and asked her if she'd seen
him.

"Oh, him," she said. "Cheapskate. He was here,
talked me out of my grandmother's cake plate for two
bucks."

* * *

An older woman wearing a large cotton duster
over her dress was packing up boxes at the second address. "Oh
yeah, I know Merritt," she said. "He comes to our sales all the
time."

"I do this professionally," she said, before I
could ask. "Run estate sales, that is. Merritt came by about ten
Thursday. We had lots of books and coins and record albums. Nothing
he buys. We chatted and he left."

She didn't seem curious about why I was
asking, and I hated to tell her anyway.

The third house was in an older neighborhood
of brick bungalows. An older man, maybe in his late sixties, said
he'd been too busy to notice who'd been at his sale Thursday. He
agreed to look through his cash box, but there was no check from
Merritt Ragan.

Depressed, I nearly skipped the fourth house
entirely after pulling up to the curb. Two young mothers had piled
a load of playpens, baby strollers, toys, and other kid
paraphernalia in the driveway. It was the exercise bike that caught
my eye.

I got out of the van and circled it warily.
Kicked the tire. Checked the odometer. It had twelve miles on it.
One of the women noticed my interest.

"My husband gave me that last year for an
anniversary gift," she said. "I kicked the bum out a week later.
Let you have the bike for $30, and I'll throw in the Thigh Master
for nothing."

"Don't think so," I said. It turned out that
she hadn't seen anybody who looked like Rumpelstiltskin the day
before.

A convenience store a couple blocks away
looked like a good place to get a cold drink and use the phone. I
left the drink cooler door open while I decided between Slim Fast
and Ultra Slim Fast. I went with the Ultra. Then I called home
again.

"House Mouse." My prodigal mother had
returned.

"Where the hell were you?"

"You're dieting again, aren't you?" she
snapped. "God help us all. If you must know, those old prunes over
at the hospital wouldn't tell me diddly over the phone, so I went
for a visit."

"You didn't," I said, knowing she
had.

"Stephen Ragan hasn't been anywhere since
Wednesday," she said. "He burned his hands in a craft class.
Second-degree burns. He's in the infirmary and he's heavily
sedated. I saw him with my own eyes."

I sighed. "Good work. I don't want to know how
you got that information."

"I told 'em I was Sergeant Edna Bentley of the
Atlanta PD," she said proudly.

When I pointed out that she'd committed a
felony, impersonating a police officer, she made a rude noise.
"Don't be late for supper," she said nastily. "It's fried chicken,
buttermilk biscuits, and
p
each cobbler.
Don't worry, though; since you're counting calories, I'll make
unsweetened iced tea."

I hung up the phone and groaned. That's when I
noticed the cardboard sign tacked to a utility pole across the
street. "Estate Sale. Thurs. Fri.," it said. There was an address
and an arrow pointing down the nearest cross street. The house was
a two-story white frame affair. The lot was weedy, and the paint
was peeling. I knocked at the screen door. When there was no
answer, I poked my head in and hollered, "Anybody home?"

The woman who came bustling up the hall was in
her early fifties probably. She was short, maybe 5'2", with gray
hair cut in a Dutch boy, and her china blue eyes regarded me
warily.

"Most everything's already sold," she said,
wiping her hands on the rickrack-trimmed apron tied around her
thick middle. "Just a few things left. Come in if you want. I'll be
in the kitchen."

She hurried away down the hall. The house
smelled of mothballs. She was right, there wasn't much left at all.
The living room floors were stripped bare, and my footsteps echoed
loudly in the high-ceilinged room. All that was left here was a
lumpy brown armchair that faced an old rounded-edge television with
aluminum-foil-wrapped antennas.

A large mahogany china cabinet looked forlorn
in the dining room. There were light rectangles on the painted
walls, where pictures had once hung. I peered inside the cabinet.
There were some chipped crystal goblets and two solitary
rose-patterned dinner plates. And a cracked cream pitcher with a
familiar-looking design of bluebirds and butterflies. I picked it
up. The handle had been broken and clumsily glued back
together.