Murder at the Art & Craft Fair (23 page)

Chapter
Forty-
Two

Sunday morning arrived, and in many ways it was a
typical Sunday morning. I picked Lou up and we headed to church. In days gone
by we arrived early and partook of those delicious éclairs the church provided
for all the people who skipped the fast food restaurants on their way to church
and felt they needed something to help them stay obese.

We refrained from talking about the case until after
church, and even then, our first thoughts were of our pastor’s sermon, and what
we got from it. Our pastor always delivered a message worth remembering.
Sometimes we discussed other people at church, not in a gossiping way, but as
they might relate to the two of us. Next, our thoughts navigated to lunch, and
what we were going to do about it. In the olden days, before Lou and I began to
watch our figures, we always ate out, but now we each return to our home and
eat alone, and it was no different that Sunday. Well, I usually eat alone.
Sometimes Lou picks up Thelma Lou and takes her somewhere. Neither of us had
made plans for that Sunday afternoon, but still a little worn out from the case
we’d been working on, both of us opted to eat at home, take a nap, and pick up
the mystery that both of us had included in our repertoire the day before. But
before we parted ways, I had to ask him a question.

“Lou, did God give you a message today?”

“The eagle has landed.”

I thought about Lou’s four words for a moment. Nothing
he said clued me in as to the identity of the murderer, and I knew better than
to ask him what it meant.

“I know that saying is a famous line delivered aboard
a space shuttle, but I have no clue how it relates to our case. Maybe a good
lunch and a better nap will enlighten me.”

“And Cy, don’t forget to call Bill Hardy and see if he
pulled anyone over on Saturday night. I know I’m going to be awfully
disappointed if he didn’t.”

“And I know that someone else will be awfully
disappointed if he did.”

Lou laughed at my remark.

I dropped Lou off at his place, and went home and
called Bill Hardy. Again, no answer. Where was he? I was a firm believer that
anyone who had to return to work after a week’s vacation needed to get back and
rest at least one day before returning to work. I remembered that Bill had to
be back at work on Monday. Then, I remembered that Bill had kids. I wondered
how he was able to keep his kids out of school for a week, but then I suspected
that his kids wanted to do everything they could possibly do, which meant that
Bill would get back to Hilldale much later than an impatient lieutenant wanted
him to return. I put the phone back on the hook, and went to fix myself
something to eat. After eating, I headed for a much-needed nap. I would try
Bill again after I got up.

+++

I can’t figure why I always yawn when I wake up, but
many times I do. That Sunday, I woke up, remembered where I was, and recalled
that I didn’t have a lot on my plate that day. I had one phone call to make,
but I might have to repeat that phone call several times before I reached my
party. I also had a book to finish reading, one that I’d started the day
before. I liked the life of a semi-retired policeman. I lay there and thought
of the same things I thought of just a short time before. Did I want to retire
and take it easy? Did I want to work part time as a private detective? Did I
want to get married? Did I want to move away from Hilldale, maybe move to
Lexington? I still wasn’t sure of the answers to any of those questions, so I
guessed that meant that for the time being I was to carry on as usual. God
would let me know what to do in good time.

+++

When I was good and ready, I pushed myself from my bed
and ambled to the living room. I gave Bill Hardy a little more time to get
home. I picked up the book I was reading and focused in on the clues that would
help me solve that mystery. Nero Wolfe had it right. Why move around all over
the place if you can solve a murder in the comfort of your own home? Did that
mean I was to retire and read all the time? I wasn’t sure that I was to do
that, but I had come to really enjoy reading a good mystery, and was constantly
adding new authors to my favorites list.

+++

It was a little after 5:00 when I tried Bill again.
This time he answered.

“Bill, this is Cy Dekker.”

“Hey, Cy, good timing. We just got back from vacation
fifteen or twenty minutes ago. What can I do for you?”

“A witness told me that one of Hilldale’s finest
pulled over a motorist somewhere near Hilldale Park last Saturday night. I’ve
hit a dead-end and was wondering if that officer might have been you.”

“It was. Am I being accused of police brutality?”

I could hardly control my excitement.

“Nothing like that. Did you know there was a murder in
the park that night?”

“No, Cy. We left on vacation early Sunday morning,
didn’t even take time to read the paper before we left.”

“Well, we didn’t discover the body until late Sunday
anyway. From what we can deduce and what Frank has told us, we think the murder
might have happened just prior to your police stop. There’s no record that you
gave this person a ticket, but I was wondering if you can remember his or her
name.”

“I remember I made a note of it at the time, left it
in the cruiser. Let me run out there and see if it’s still there.”

I only had time to hum the Final Jeopardy theme one
and a half times before Bill returned.

“Cy, I’ve got it.”

Bill gave me the name and address. His declaration
surprised me. I was expecting to hear a different name, although I wasn’t sure
which different name I was expecting to hear. I was pretty sure I had my
murderer, but I needed to make another call. I dialed another number, asked one
question, and found out the motive that I hadn’t figured out on my own. I hung
up, and for some reason thought of our clue of the day. I might be able to tie
that in, too, but I had to go to the computer to do so. Five minutes later, my
suspicions confirmed, I was ready to wrap up the case. I felt certain that when
Monday arrived I could prove the robbery as well as the murder.

I took a couple of minutes to think about what we
would do before I contacted Lou. I wanted to be there to arrest the murderer. I
envisioned putting the murderer in Lightning’s back seat, and later getting hit
over the head while I drove. I’ve been a homicide detective long enough that I
knew Lightning wasn’t built for apprehending anyone. Lou and I needed back up.
Since the two of us are the only two people in homicide, our back up would have
to be someone outside of homicide. Immediately I thought of the perfect back up
couple, Dan and Heather. Both of them drove cruisers, with protection between
them and a suspect in the back seat, and rear doors that couldn’t be opened from
the inside.

I called Lou first, told him what I’d learned. Then, I
called Heather and asked if she and Dan would be willing to assist us with our
arrest. I figured that all she had to do to check with Dan was turn her head,
and I was right. After I fixed them up, those two started spending most of
their non-working hours together. I expect that soon Lou and I will be invited
to their wedding. Heather confirmed what I expected, not about the wedding, but
that she and Dan would be delighted to assist us. I didn’t think the
unsuspecting murderer was going anywhere, so I delayed the inevitable until the
next day, Monday morning. We would meet in front of the police station at 7:00.
We planned to eat and go to the bank before confronting the murderer. After making
an arrest, our job would be over until someone else decided to commit a murder.
Like everywhere else, that happened too often in Hilldale.

Chapter
Forty-
Three

The idea of another trip through the countryside so
soon didn’t excite me a whole lot, but it was made more palatable by the fact
that our case would be at an end. Lou and I would be back to our normal lives
before the day was over. Well, I’m not sure how normal our lives are, but
whatever is normal for us.

We arrived at the police station a little before 7:00.
It didn’t surprise me that Dan and Heather were already there. Just seeing
Heather helped me hop out of Lightning a little faster than I normally would. I
hugged her a little longer than I might have if Jennifer had been there. I
wasn’t in love with two women. Heather was more like a daughter to me, but she
looked good enough, and was sweet enough, that I would have tried to give Dan a
run for his money if I’d been twenty to twenty-five years younger. Of course if
I’d been younger, Dan wouldn’t have stood a chance.

We agreed on a place to eat breakfast and wasted
little time getting there. We ate and hopped back in our vehicles. We had work
to do and we had a little drive ahead of us. At least Sirius XM Radio would
make each of those minutes pass more pleasantly. We were in luck. Not only did
we start our drive just before a new program started on Radio Classics, but I
found out the next four shows were all detective shows, my favorite kind. Lou
and I smiled a little more than we used to smile when we were on our way to
apprehend a murderer, but that was before we discovered Radio Classics.

We arrived at our destination and with a subpoena in
hand, headed to the bank. I wanted to do it right, and arm myself with every
piece of evidence I could before making an arrest. We had no problem at the
bank, and a look at the account in question confirmed my suspicions. I was sure
we had enough evidence for a conviction. We picked up another partner in crime
solving and let him lead us to the murderer’s residence.

A man came to the door.

“Roscoe Collins?”

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Collins, I’m Lt. Dekker with the Hilldale Police
Department. You are under arrest for the murder of Tom Kincaid.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, but you do, Mr. Collins. You murdered Tom on
Saturday night.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, but I have witnesses as
to where I was on Saturday.”

“During the day, Mr. Collins. But I’m talking about
Saturday night. Saturday night you were in Hilldale, and you murdered Tom Kincaid.
Not only did you murder him, but you stole his money.”

“That’s a lie.”

“You might have been able to get away with it, Mr.
Collins, if you hadn’t pulled out in front of a cop right after you committed
the murder.”

“You have a record of a ticket?”

“No, just the say-so of the cop who stopped you. He
took down your name and address.”

We cuffed Collins and took him away. It was time to
leave. We had another stop to make.

We arrived at our second destination just as the woman
in question was trying to back out of her driveway. Heather pulled up and
blocked the driveway, prevented her from leaving.

“Going somewhere, Mrs. Kincaid?”

“That’s right. I have an errand to run. Who is this
man, Sid?”

I assumed that Sid must have been Sheriff Offutt’s
first name. I could tell the woman was terrified, and she spoke to the only
person she recognized.

“Just listen to the man, Margie.”

“Mrs. Kincaid, we have just arrested your
brother-in-law for your husband’s murder. We are taking you in as an accessory
after the fact. We might even find out that the murder was all your idea.”

“Murder. He was murdered in Hilldale. I’m here in
Murray. Roscoe was at a football game in Richmond. It would be hard for Roscoe
to be in one place and murder someone somewhere else.”

“Not if the football game was in the afternoon, and
the murder happened at night, about an hour away from where the football game
took place. Now, let me read you your rights before you say anything else.”

+++

Sheriff Offutt put Margie Kincaid in the back of his
cruiser, and everyone headed to the Sheriff’s office. We kept the
co-conspirators separated and tackled the widow first. She admitted signing her
name to the one check and endorsing her husband’s name on a second check. It
was part of a deposit that totaled a little over $1,300, although she wouldn’t
admit that the money came from his Saturday sales at the art and craft fair.
Not bad for one day of work. I needed to see if I could turn anything I could
do into money, and then I realized I couldn’t do much of anything except solve
murders.

We kept after Roscoe Collins for a couple of hours
until he broke down and confessed. He said he didn’t go to Hilldale to murder
his brother-in-law, but that he stopped by there on Friday and saw Tom eating
dinner with some woman. He followed the two of them back to the motel and
planned to confront his brother-in-law then, but said he noticed that a police
cruiser had driven by a couple of times and the officer was eyeing him. He left
and didn’t return until Saturday night after the game. He got to the art and
craft fair just as Tom Kincaid rescued a woman falling from a stepstool. He
noticed it was the same woman he had seen his brother-in-law with the night
before, and that they were slow in separating. He was about to confront his
brother-in-law when a man walked up and he and Kincaid went into Kincaid’s
tent. They were there quite a while. During that time, a woman walked up,
followed by a man with some kind of statue. Collins recognized it as one of his
brother-in-law’s puzzles. The man left quickly and Collins admitted that he
made a noise to frighten the woman, who ran away as quickly as she could. When
the second man in his brother-in-law’s tent finally left, Collins waited a few
seconds, then went over to confront Kincaid. On the way, he picked up the
Statue of Liberty puzzle, which he had planned to return to his brother-in-law.
When Kincaid angrily denied any wrongdoing and turned away, Collins lost
control and hit his brother-in-law in the back of the head with the statue.
When he realized that he had killed him, he hit him a few more times and picked
up the cashbox, hoping that the police would think Kincaid was murdered when he
confronted a robber. When he returned to Murray, he handed the cashbox to his
sister-in-law and told her what he had done. She didn’t seem too upset,
particularly after she counted the money. Collins admitted that he stole his
brother-in-law’s keys. Since it was late, he decided to spend the night in the
room he knew his brother-in-law had rented at the motel, and left for home just
before daylight on Sunday morning.

+++

When I learned the name of the man who had been
stopped on Saturday night, it meant nothing to me. When I found out he lived in
Murray, I called the sheriff, who identified the man as Kincaid’s brother-in-law.
I remembered that his brother-in-law was a big MSU football fan and had gone to
an away football game, and when I thought of the clue “the eagle has landed,” I
realized the saying meant the space capsule had touched down, which reminded me
of touchdown, and football. Then I realized that Richmond isn’t that far from
Hilldale, and Collins could have taken in a football game in the afternoon and
murdered his brother-in-law at night. If Roscoe Collins had lived a good
distance from Murray, I would never have realized that the man a fellow officer
had stopped for pulling out into traffic on the night of the murder had any
connection to Kincaid. Without that connection, I wouldn’t have considered him
to be a likely murder suspect.

+++

It was 4:18 when we left Murray. We stopped by a KFC
on the way out of town. We had a long road ahead of us. The trip back would
take longer. We would be losing an hour. I contemplated stopping at Sutton’s or
Carrabba’s as we drove through Lexington, maybe even take a side trip to
Danville and introduce Dan and Heather to Burke’s Bakery and The Twisted
Sifter. Then I realized that the two bakeries would have long since closed
before we arrived anywhere near Danville, but Carrabba’s would be open until
11:00 and Sutton’s until 2:00 in the morning. We could eat while our prisoner
gnawed on some KFC chicken bones in the back seat. It didn’t matter how late we
got back. While we might not return to Hilldale until after midnight, our
prisoner had nowhere to go, and I planned to sleep late on Monday.