Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112) (6 page)

“Let’s wait until we have more definite information. You aren’t sure there’s a link with Lauder Point yet.”

Rob was sure, but he didn’t insist. He would have to talk to Maddie eventually, but maybe Mack was right to wait. No reason to stir the chief up sooner than he had to.

“M
ESSY
process, “ Margaret McLean muttered, scrubbing her hands under the kitchen faucet. Linda had fingerprinted her first thing. “For purposes of elimination, right?” No flies on Ms. McLean.

Linda grinned and stowed her gear. Jake Sorenson was finishing a cup of coffee.

Good coffee, Rob reflected, sipping his. What it was to have a cooperative suspect. He cleared his throat ostentatiously and fingered the tape recorder, though it didn’t need adjusting.

The librarian dried her hands and sat opposite him with an air of resignation. “Okay. Have at me. I suppose I’m the prime suspect.”

“As a matter of fact, you’re down near the bottom of the list.” He sent Linda and Jake off to inspect the house, both of them grinning.

“They’re not going to read my data files, are they?”

“Nope.”

A small smile warmed her face. “Good. Jake should know my computer just got here. He carried it in.”

Jake had been instructed to point out everything he and Todd had brought into the house for the record. Rob didn’t say that. He turned the tape player on, gave his name and the date, and asked her to identify herself.

“Margaret McLean, spinster of this parish.”

Rob frowned. Some people had to make jokes. Defense mechanism.

“Sorry.” She didn’t look remorseful. “I’m Margaret McLean, 404 Old Cedar Street. I own the house.”

“When did you buy it?”

“I put earnest money down July 25th. The deal closed August 13th. I flew up and signed all the tax documents on the 15th.”

“Fast.”

“I thought so. I paid cash, used a certified check.” She named a Wells Fargo branch in Santa Monica.

Cash. With no mortgage involved—and no bank inspectors to nose around—the process would have gone faster than usual. “Did you return to Klalo at any time after you signed the papers?”

“No, and I was only in town for about an hour on the fifteenth.” Her face darkened. “I had to take a day off work to sign.”

“You received the keys at that time?”

“Yes, but not the key to the garage. I picked it up yesterday. Apparently they forgot to give it to me.”

“That’s the key to the padlock on the garage’s front doors. What about the back door?”

She shrugged. “No key to that.”

“There
is
no key, or you don’t know where it is?”

“Don’t know.”

Neither lock had showed signs of being forced. The real estate agent had some explaining to do.

She had pulled her capacious purse to her lap and was rooting in it. “Aha!” She brandished a small manila envelope. “If you want to document my drive north, I have receipts from a significant number of service stations between here and Los Angeles. The van was a gas hog.”

“I’ll take your word. So you decided to buy the house, paid the earnest money, and left here the 25th of July?”

“I flew out of Portland Airport July 26th at six-thirty in the morning and didn’t return until I came to sign the papers. I flew back to LAX immediately because I was moving my daughter to Stanford early. She’s a freshman and attended a science orientation. She wanted to look for a part-time job, too.”

“Big transition.”

“For Lucy and for me.” She had a fetching smile, expressive of untrammeled delight.

He cleared his throat.

The smile faded. “I can probably document where I was throughout August, lots of receipts.”

He said, “It won’t be necessary, Ms. McLean. You were working after that?”

“During and after.” She gave the name and address of the library she had worked at, and the name and a telephone number of a colleague. She had been deputy head of a consortium of public libraries, much larger than the Latouche County Regional Library.

He wondered why she had chosen to move to a rural system. “Do you have connections in Latouche County?”

She looked blank.

“Friends, relatives…”

“Just Hazel Guthrie.”

“What?” He gaped.

“She’s my hero. I think she died a couple of years ago but she was a legendary librarian. She worked out a procedure for dealing with attempts at censorship from community groups. It’s a national model.”

When he didn’t speak, she leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “What’s wonderful about it is that it’s nonconfrontational. It keeps the books on the shelves, but it gives people who have grievances a way to express their feelings, too, and even to become part of the selection process. She also computerized the library, both catalogue and circulation, years ahead of everybody else, and before that she made interlibrary loans available to ordinary patrons, not just university professors. I could go on.” In her enthusiasm she jiggled the purse and it began to slide off her lap. She grabbed it and swung it up on the table. “Don’t tell me you never heard of her.”

“Paused at eleven-eighteen.” He shut the machine off and smiled at her. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Hazel Guthrie was my grandmother.”

Margaret McLean blushed charmingly for a forty-something woman.

“I live in her house.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re fixing it up. I hope you don’t mean to sell it. It should be a national shrine.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He spoke drily but he was moved. His grandmother had died at eighty-seven, about fifteen years before her time, as far as Rob was concerned. He still missed her intelligence and humor. His grandparents had raised him after his mother’s death the year he turned ten.

Hazel Guthrie had not been a demonstrative woman, but he had never been in doubt of her affection. After a few years of post-adolescent revolt, he hadn’t doubted his affection for her, either. They had drawn closer in the last ten years of her life, when he came back to Klalo.

He fiddled with the recorder, then turned it on. “Resuming at eleven-twenty.” He took Ms. McLean through her arrival in Klalo, her retrieval of the garage key, and her discovery of the rock drawing, with attention to the state of the garage floor and the position of the plywood lid.

“The victim’s hand was partially exposed when I saw the open doors,” he added. “Weren’t you aware of it earlier?”

She shuddered. “No. I thought moles had been digging, or rats, but I didn’t know why. There was a bad smell, like a dead animal. My God, how awful.” Tears came to her eyes, and she blinked hard. “I thought there might be a dead cat, something like that.” She sniffed and dug in her purse for a tissue. “Sorry.”

He waited for her to compose herself. “Okay, thanks, Ms. McLean. Interview ended.” He glanced at the kitchen clock and added the time.

She blew her nose. “You’re very formal.”

“I was being official. Thanks, Meg.” He rose and stretched. “And thanks for the coffee.”

“That’s it?”

“For the time being.” He slipped the recorder into his jacket pocket and gestured toward the living room where Linda and Jake were moving around audibly. “They’ll be at it awhile yet, and Deputy Jones is checking out the backyard.” He explained why.

“I guess that makes sense.” She sighed. “This is going to be a nightmare, isn’t it? And to think I just wanted to settle in peacefully and get acquainted before I start work. ‘The best-laid plans…’”

He dipped into memory. “‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are, it might have been.’”

She laughed and he found himself laughing, too. “Gran and I used to do that, cap each other’s clichés.”

“The last bastion against Alzheimer’s.”

“That, at least, was a problem she never had.”

She said ruefully, “I was thinking of my own descent into oblivion.”

M
AY I speak to Charlotte Tichnor?” Rob identified himself, leaned back in the chair, and wriggled his stiff shoulders. He was phoning from home so he’d be handy if something turned up in the search next door.

The woman at the Seattle end of the line said, “She’s at Harrison Hot Springs for the rest of the week. This is her daughter, Carol Tichnor. Are you calling about my grandfather’s house?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The house is our only connection with Latouche County these days. We sold it in August.”

The royal
we
irritated Rob. “Your mother sold it, certainly.”

“She’s out of town,” she repeated.

“I talked to the realtor who handled the sale. She told me someone borrowed the key to the garage after Ms. McLean’s offer was accepted.” Rob took a sip of cold coffee and his stomach roiled. He supposed he should eat lunch, though the idea wasn’t appealing.

“That was before the sale closed. We thought some family things might be left in there, so I asked the office to mail us the key. I dropped by, but the garage was empty, so I gave the key back.”

“There should have been two keys, padlock in front, regular lock in back.”

She hesitated. “Just one key.”

“Did you mail it back?” He fiddled with his ballpoint, clicking the nib in and out.

“I put it into an envelope and slipped it through the agency mail slot on my way out of town.”

He jotted a note, probably illegible. “I see. Did you enter the garage?”

“No, I just stuck my head in the back.”

Meg had said the key didn’t work in that door. Rob noted the discrepancy. “When was that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. First week of August. Must have been a Friday.”

“You entered the back door?”

She gave a short laugh. “Okay, okay, I confess. After going to the trouble of getting the key, I just peeked through the window. The garage was empty. I didn’t bother to go in.”

Rob wondered whether she was telling the truth. If she was, the back-door window had not been blocked by the plywood lid at that point. “You could see clearly?”

“It was dim,” she admitted, “but I was looking for a big piece of furniture, an oak chiffonier. It wasn’t there. The place was empty,” she repeated, sounding peevish.

He allowed his skepticism to enter his voice. “Are you sure you didn’t go into the garage and open the storage compartment in the floor?”

To his surprise, she gave a gurgle of laughter. “Great-grandpa’s hidey-hole?”

“What?” He sat up straight.

“I can tell you don’t know our scandalous history. My greatgrandfather, Otto Strohmeyer, was a notorious bootlegger. He had a still up near Tyee Lake. He used to stow the hooch in his garage until it was time to distribute it to his clients.”

Rob swore under his breath. The garage had obviously been built in the 1920s. Why hadn’t he thought of bootlegging? It was the kind of thing Gran would have left unsaid. She would have known about it, of course, but she wouldn’t have wanted Rob-the-child to judge Emil Strohmeyer for the sins of his father. Not that she would have considered bathtub gin much of a sin, nor did Rob. It was the scofflaw mentality that bothered him. That and the violence. A Clark County sheriff had been killed in a shootout with bootleggers.

“Did everyone in your family know about the cache?”

“Mother did, of course. We—my brothers and I—used to spend a month with the grandparents every summer. Grandpa showed it to me one day when I got bored and wanted to go home to Seattle. I was thirteen. He’d probably already showed it to the boys.” She hesitated, then gave another giggle. She had to be pushing fifty. “Mother would not have approved. She’s always been the soul of propriety.”

“So she might not have discussed the space with the real estate people?”

“Probably not. It’s like cancer.”

“What?”‘

“The C-word. Her generation never mentioned it, like it was shameful or something. Same with bootlegging. Never mind that the old man’s illicit sales kept the family off the soup line during the Depression.”

“Wasn’t the Volstead Amendment repealed by then?”

“It took years,” she said coolly, “and meanwhile the sale of moonshine flourished. Grandpa had some good stories. His dad used to take him along for the ride when it was time to go out on the delivery route. The sight of Grandpa’s innocent face probably disarmed the revenuers.”

Rob stared at the wallpaper pattern in Hazel Guthrie’s home office, cabbage roses in sad need of replacement. “I see. Well, Ms. Tichnor, I’m sorry to be the one to break the news, but we found human remains in that compartment, very likely a murder victim. I’m afraid your mother is in for a little embarrassment.”

There was silence on the line. Finally, Carol Tichnor said, her voice high and tight, “A murder victim? Who?”

“No idea, ma’am. Male, dark hair.”

“Oh, God, oh, uh, excuse me. This is awful. I need to think….” The line went dead.

Rob hit Redial and after six rings got an answering machine. He left his phone numbers, home, cell, and office, but he had the feeling Carol Tichnor was not going to return his call until she’d talked to someone—her mother? And a lawyer, or the family insurance agent. People like the Tichnors were apt to worry about liability.

He set the receiver back in its cradle and rose, yawning in spite of the stimulus of new information. His eyes kept going out of focus from lack of sleep. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Roberto.