Authors: Parnell Hall
Dead Man's Puzzle (5 page)
Cora’s visitor sat on the couch. He wore blue jeans, a plaid shirt, a peacoat, and a stocking cap. He was shivering. His eyes were watery, and his nose was running.
“You’re cold. You want some tea?”
“No.”
“Good. You wouldn’t get it. It’s late, I’m tired, you got in by saying the magic words. Who are you and what do you want?”
“Stockholm.”
“Like the syndrome?”
“Excuse me?”
“Skip it. How do you know Overmeyer?”
“We go way back.”
“You don’t look old enough.”
“He knew my father.”
“Where?”
“Is it important?”
“No. I don’t feel like cross-examining you. You got a story to tell, tell it.”
“Fifty years ago, Overmeyer and my father were partners.”
“In what?”
“An investment.”
“What kind of investment?”
“Stock.”
“Aha.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Nothing. I just have some stocks of my own. I know how volatile the market can be.”
“Exactly. Anything you do, you take a chance.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not like we played the market. We had a little money, we bought some stock, we held on to it.”
“What was the stock?”
His eyes flicked. Cora wondered if he was going to lie. Instead, he evaded.
“You know, fifty years ago everybody smoked.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It looked like everybody always would.”
“So?”
“We bought Philip Morris.”
“Oh.”
“Not a lot. But since then it’s split several times.”
“So why wasn’t Overmeyer rich?”
“He and my father were silent partners. They didn’t hold the stock.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They had the right to the money. It just wasn’t in their name.”
“What gave them the right?”
“Stock-pooling agreement.”
“Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are the other two partners?”
“That’s not important.”
“Are they living?”
“That’s not important.”
“It is to them.”
“The stock belongs to them and their descendants. That doesn’t matter. The point is, there’s four owners. I’m one of them. Overmeyer was another.”
“Who’s his heir?”
“I have no idea.”
“Where’s the stock-pooling agreement?”
“Everyone had a copy.”
“Where’s yours?”
“Mislaid.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“When my father died, I could not find it in his papers.”
“So you went to Overmeyer.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
His face showed impatience. “It doesn’t matter. You’re obsessing about small things. The important thing is if they killed Overmeyer, they could be after me.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re smart. You’re resourceful. You’ll look out for my interests.”
“You live in Bakerhaven?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“That’s not important.”
“It is to me. Where can I reach you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll reach you.”
Cora put up her hands. “No, no, no. This is utterly wacky. Your father and the dead man were in a partnership with two guys you won’t name over a pooling agreement you don’t have that leads you to believe whoever killed Overmeyer may be after you?”
He smiled. “Now you’ve got it.”
“So why aren’t the other two in danger?”
“I’m sure they are. I just don’t care.” His nose twitched. “Something burning?”
“Oh, my God! The noodles!”
Cora leapt up, raced into the kitchen.
The water had boiled dry. The noodles were scorching the pan. Wisps of smoke were curling up to the ceiling.
She grabbed the pot, burned her hand, screamed, cursed, dropped the pot. She shut off the fire, snatched up a pot holder, put the pan in the sink, turned on the water. Jumped back from the mushroom cloud of steam that erupted. As it subsided, she shut off the water, assured herself nothing was on fire.
Cora composed herself, went back to her visitor.
He was gone.
Chief Harper looked as if he’d just eaten a bucket of nails instead of one of Mrs. Cushman’s blueberry-ginger muffins. “Stock-pooling agreement?”
“Yeah. Can you trace it for me, Chief?”
“Someone named Stockholm bought stock?”
“I admit it’s quite a coincidence.”
“Yeah. Like Moneymaker winning the poker tournament.”
“If the guy’s telling the truth, the stock wouldn’t be in his name.”
“Whose name would it be in?”
“I have no idea.”
“That makes it harder to trace.”
“Yeah.”
“And now I got my own problems. Thanks to Rick Reed and Becky Baldwin, everyone and their brother knows I got a homicide. Even though I haven’t officially announced it yet.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I want to calm down first. So I don’t bite somebody’s head off. Then you come to me with a stock-pooling story that makes no sense.”
“It makes no sense because we don’t know the details.”
“No,” Harper said. “It makes no sense because it doesn’t make sense. A ninety-two-year-old man living in squalor and all the time he’s got a fortune in stocks squirreled away?”
“Would that be the first rich recluse you ever ran into, Chief?”
“No. But if that’s the case, why do you kill him for it? More to the point, why do you kill him for it if you don’t get it?”
“We don’t
know
no one got it.”
“Yes, we do. We know no one
inherited
it. The guy doesn’t have a relative within a hundred miles of here. Make that five hundred. The best I can do is a great-nephew from San Antonio who’s flying in to settle the estate.”
“What estate?”
“Exactly. The guy’s got a ramshackle hut on a quarter acre of land. It might be worth twenty or thirty thousand to anyone who wanted to tear down the house and start over. It’s hard to imagine this guy from San Antonio doing that. So, unless some other heir pops up, he’s likely to turn it over to the local Realtor and go home.”
“Twenty or thirty thousand is a nice piece of pocket change.”
“Can you see some guy from San Antonio sending his uncle poison candy in the hope of picking it up?”
“Was the poison in candy?”
“I’m not sure what the poison was in.”
“From the look on your face, I’d say your coffee. What’s the problem, Chief?”
“What’s the problem? I’ve got a motiveless crime with no suspects. Now you bring me some cock-and-bull story about some guy with no name and no address.”
“You’re the police. I imagine you can get his address.”
“Did he come in a car?”
“If I had a license plate number, I’d have given it to you, Chief.”
“Did he come in a car?”
“He came right up the walk and knocked on the door.”
“Did he come in a car?”
“Damn it, I don’t know!” Cora said irritably. “There. You happy? I was cooking when he arrived, I was burning noodles when he left.”
“Burning noodles?”
“Don’t start with me, Chief. Sherry’s gone, I’m on my own. I’m not having an easy time. I’m not used to being on my own.”
“You should get married again.”
“Is that a proposal? I thought you had a wife and kid.”
“What are you going to do when they get home?”
“Eat.”
“Are you staying there?”
“No. Sherry can’t move in with Aaron’s folks. One of us has to go.”
“You’re moving in with Aaron’s folks?”
Cora grimaced. “Go ahead. Make fun. Just because you’ve got a murder you can’t solve.”
“You can’t either. You didn’t even see a car.”
“Bite me.”
Harper frowned. “If it has to do with stock, what’s it got to do with a computer?”
“Maybe it’s logged in the computer.”
“Hmmm.”
“Or the pooling agreement,” Cora said. “No one’s found his pooling agreement. If it’s written up in WordPerfect, you’d just have to print it out. Of course, then it wouldn’t be signed.” Cora sighed. “Damn. I wish Sherry were here. She knows this stuff. Like how you scan a document and save it as a TIFF or a JFIF or a JPEG.”
“How many shares of stock are we talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the company?”
“Philip Morris.”
“Oh, my God. Overmeyer’s an insider, blowing the whistle on the tobacco companies.”
“Right. So they poisoned him with arsenic. They probably put it in his cigarettes. Can you smoke arsenic? I wouldn’t think so. Cyanide seems more likely.”
“It wasn’t cyanide.”
“You think I’m serious?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m still upset about Becky Baldwin. Coming in here with a cock-and-bull story.”
“Cock-and-bull story?”
“That Dennis is hanging around. I haven’t seen him. Have you?”
“You think Becky invented that story to give her an excuse to drop by the police station just on the off chance you had a murder investigation?”
“No. But suppose she knew about it. Suppose she overheard one of Barney Nathan’s nurses talking about it over lunch. That’s not hard to believe.”
“It demonstrates a level of paranoia I wouldn’t have expected of you, Chief. Then again, if you really think I hid that gun . . .”
“I didn’t say I thought you
hid
the gun. I said I thought you
found
the gun. Before you found it with me.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Why? Because it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t do? Actually, it’s
exactly
the sort of thing you’d do. You may not have done it in this case. That just means you didn’t have the opportunity.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“No.”
“Good. I didn’t think so, but you never know. So, what’s with the gun? You traced it yet?”
“Almost.”
“What’s that mean?”
“We’ve narrowed it down.”
“To what?”
“West Virginia.”
“Oh?”
“The serial number matches a shipment of Smith and Wesson revolvers shipped to Rawley’s Hardware and Sporting Goods in the summer of 1948.”
“Nice work, Chief.”
“Thank you. This information might have been more helpful if Rawley’s Hardware and Sporting Goods hadn’t burned to the ground in 1963.”
“After carefully registering every gun sale with the government?”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice.”
“You mean they didn’t?”
“No, they did. The records just don’t happen to include Mr. Overmeyer’s weapon.”
“So it’s a dead end?”
“At least a detour. At the moment, we’re tracing test bullets fired from Overmeyer’s gun against fatal bullets from unsolved homicides.”
“How long will that take?”
“You’d have to ask Dan.” Harper shook his head. “His last estimate was Christmas.”
Becky Baldwin frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not a riddle,” Cora told her. “We’re just having a conversation. When do you stop looking for something?”
“You mean when do you give up?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Actually, that’s one answer. When do you stop looking? When you give up. So what’s the other answer?”
“When you find it?” Becky said with ill-suppressed irritation.
“Yes,” Cora said. “You stop looking when you find it. That’s a real danger in a murder investigation. It’s the reason so many innocent people go to jail. The police are looking for a killer, they find him, they stop looking. The fact he isn’t the killer doesn’t matter. The police have stopped looking.”
“That doesn’t fit your premise,” Becky said.
“What do you mean?”
“You said you stop looking for something when you find it. If the person isn’t the killer, then the police haven’t found it.”
“Exactly,” Cora said.
Becky shook her head. “That’s semantically incorrect. Somewhat odd, for a woman of your verbal talents.”
“Don’t be irritating. I’m not playing word games. Just trying to make a point. The police were looking for something. They think they found it, so they stopped looking.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cora told Becky about the clues in the crossword puzzle.
Becky frowned. “You were looking for a computer and you found a gun? So you stopped looking?”
“Chief Harper stopped looking.”
“Did you point that out to him?”
“I tried. A cursory inspection of the house does not indicate the presence of a computer.”
“Does a cursory inspection of the house make the presence of a computer seem likely?”
“Oh.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Have you seen Overmeyer’s cabin?”
“No. Why?”
“Somehow a computer isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.”
“What is?”
“A HazMat suit.”
“A what?”
“Whatever you call ’em. You know, those bulky space suits when there might be an airborne virus. Like Dustin Hoffman wore in
Outbreak
.”
“What?”
“You didn’t see it? Probably studying for the bar exam. The point is, I’m going over the place with Chief Harper, we found a gun and stopped looking.”
“So?”
“The problem with searching Overmeyer’s place is he’s only got a quarter of an acre. His neighbors have larger tracts of land, but even so, they’re rather close. They’d be apt to see a car parked in a driveway.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re a lawyer.”
“You want my legal opinion? Butt out.”
“I don’t want your legal opinion.”
“You want me to defend you if you’re arrested breaking into the place?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m glad to hear it. So what do you want me to do?”
“Help me not get caught.”
“I don’t like this,” Becky said as they drove out of town.
“What’s not to like?” Cora told her. “You’re just giving me a ride.”
“I’m a lawyer. I know the difference between giving someone a ride and being an accessory.”
“An accessory to what? I’m just paying a call on my old friend Overmeyer.”
“Who happens to be dead.”
“He has that character flaw. Aside from that, he’s a hell of a guy.”
“You’ll be careful?”
“Aren’t I always?”
“How will I know when to pick you up?”
“You’ll hear the police sirens.”
“Cora.”
“I don’t know. I’d call you on my cell phone, if I had one.”
“You don’t have a cell phone?”
“I don’t need one. Except for breaking and entering. Would you advise me to get one just for that?”
Becky tried to give her a withering glance without driving off the road.
“Maybe Overmeyer’s phone is still hooked up. I can call you from it.”
“Don’t you dare! All I need is a record on my cell phone of having gotten a call from a dead man.”
“Relax. I don’t think Overmeyer even has a phone.”
“If he does, promise you won’t use it?”
“I might call my bookie. Here, this is it.”
Becky drove up the driveway.
Overmeyer’s cabin was on a country road where there were houses on only one side of the street. A grove of woods hid the neighbors to the north, but on the property to the south, a two-story Colonial was in plain view.
“So much for sneaking in,” Becky said.
“I’m not sneaking in. I’m just not leaving a car parked in front of the cabin to call attention to myself.”
“In case the police should drive by.”
“Well, it would spoil their day.”
“Not to mention mine,” Becky said dryly. “When should I pick you up?”
“Uh-oh. Not going to fly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Without appearing to stare, look over my shoulder at the neighbor’s house.
Without
appearing to stare.”
“There’s a man on the porch. Looking at us.”
“There certainly is. Which changes things. You can’t let me out and drive off.”
“Should we pretend we just pulled in to turn around?”
“Don’t be silly. No one drives all the way up a driveway to turn around.”
“I can’t help that,” Becky said. “It’s either that or drop you off.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get out of the car.”
“Huh?”
“Come on, Nancy Drew. Shut off the engine and get out. I can’t sneak in, I’ve been seen. The only thing to do is walk in like we have every right to be here.”
“We have
no
right to be here.”
“He doesn’t know that. Come on.”
Cora got out of the car and walked up to the front door.
Becky sat for a moment in helpless frustration. Then she shut off the engine and joined her.
“Good girl,” Cora said. “Wait right here, act bored. Mr. Whoosy-whatsy’s still watching us. Don’t look at him. I’ll let you in.”
“Let me in?”
“Unless you want to crawl through the window. You don’t want to crawl through the window, do you?”
Cora went around to the back of the house, pushed open the kitchen window she’d managed to unlock when she and Chief Harper were searching the place. With an athletic little hop, quite agile for a woman of more years than she was admitting, Cora squirmed through the window, crawled across the counter, and went to the front door to let in a rather exasperated Becky Baldwin.
“What was that all about?” Becky demanded.
“I had the key to the kitchen door, went around to let you in.”
“Really?”
“No, but that’s what I hope the neighbor will assume. Provided he didn’t see me climbing through the window.”
“You broke into the house?”
“Well, how did you think I was going to get in?”
“When I dropped you off in the driveway, I was just an accessory. Now I’m a full-fledged accomplice.”
“That’s good. It would be a shame to be a half-fledged accomplice. The girls in maximum security would probably tease you something awful.”
“Stop trying to humor me. I’m here, I don’t like it, let’s get on with it.” Becky looked around. “What a dump!”
“Bette Davis. Originally. Quoted by Elizabeth Taylor in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
What a dump!”
“Okay, where did you search?”
“The upstairs closet. That’s where we found the gun. In the floorboards under a box of junk.”
“How’d you find it?”
“The junk was so worthless there was no reason to keep it except to cover something up.”
“Was that your deduction? It certainly
sounds
like you.”
“You might pass that on to Chief Harper. He thinks I might have known the gun was there.”
“Seriously?”
“I resent it. The idea I might break into a crime scene to look for evidence.”
“I can see how that would rankle. Okay, where do we start?”
“Let’s start at the bottom and work up. That’s the cellar door.”
“This place has a cellar?”
“More like a crawl space.”
“You didn’t search it?”
“The chief did.”
“He find anything?”
“An old bicycle.” Cora fished a flashlight out of her purse and swung open the door. “After you, my dear.”
“Me? You got the flashlight.”
“Here.”
Becky switched on the flashlight, shone it down the steps. “I don’t see why you don’t want to—Oh, my God!”
“What is it?”
Becky recoiled, repugnance on her face. “Did the chief tell you what’s down here?”
“Rats and spiders.”
“That’s the polite version. It would appear Mr. Overmeyer’s septic system leaks.”
“The chief didn’t mention that. You see anything down there?”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“No, it’s why we came.”
“It’s why
you
came. I’m the driver.”
“Come on, Becky. Hold your nose and take a look.”
Becky glared at Cora a moment, then swung the flashlight back down the stairs. “There’s a bike.”
“I know.”
“And mousetraps.”
“What?”
“There’s a row of mousetraps. More like a semicircle.”
“Around the bottom of the stair?”
“Sort of. Convex, not concave.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought you were a linguist. The mousetraps do not encircle the bottom of the stair, they’re like a ball the bottom of the stair is about to kick. Only half, of course.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Cora took a breath, pushed by Becky to see for herself.
The mousetraps were loosely arranged as Becky had said. All were sprung. None had trapped a mouse.
“I thought he was kidding about the rats,” Cora said. She shouldn’t have. Her lungs were greeted by a blast of foul air.
She fled the cellar, closed the door. “Okay,” she said, brushing spiderwebs from her face. “Let’s try the kitchen.”
“You think he’d hide something in the kitchen?”
“I have no idea why this bird would do anything.”
“And you have no idea why anyone would want to kill him?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Cora said. “I never met the guy, and
I
want to kill him.”
“That’s not very nice. So he’s got busted plumbing. Aside from that, I’m sure he was a sweet old coot.”
“Oh, yeah? Try opening a few of those cabinets.”
“Why? Oh, my God!” Becky said, gawking at the moldy, vermin-ridden excuse for food in the cupboard. “Do you suppose he actually ate this stuff?”
“You’d think it would have killed him faster than the arsenic. For the full effect, try the refrigerator.”
“I’ll forgo the pleasure. I assume you checked the freezer?”
“It doesn’t seem to be working. At any rate, there’s nothing in it.”
Becky surveyed the kitchen cabinets, which stopped about a foot from the ceiling. “Did you look on top of the cabinets?”
“Why, Becky Baldwin, I’m proud of you. Let’s have a look.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a stepladder.”
“I think we’ll have to use a chair.” Cora eyed the two at the kitchen table with suspicion. “You’d better do it. I have to get down to fighting weight.”
“Fighting weight?”
Cora waggled her hand. “I usually get married about ten pounds less, start eating after the honeymoon.”
Becky looked shocked.
“Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Cora told her. “When you’ve had a husband or two, you’ll know what I mean.”
Becky pulled over a chair, set it in front of the counter next to the refrigerator. She climbed on the seat of the chair, stepped up onto the counter. Peered over the top of the cabinet.
“Anything there?” Cora asked.
“Cobwebs and dust.”
“What about the other cabinets?”
Becky looked around the kitchen. “They appear empty, too. There’s something on the one over the stove.”
“What?”
“Can’t tell. It’s covered with dust. I have to move the chair.”
There was a knock on the front door.
Cora quoted the lyrics from a particularly foul rap song.
“What do we do now?” Becky hissed.
“Get down off that chair, and follow my lead.”
Cora opened the front door to reveal the man from the neighbor’s porch. He was good-looking, perhaps on the younger side of middle age, brown hair with just a few flecks of gray. Cora couldn’t recall seeing him around Bakerhaven, and he was the type of man she’d be apt to remember. She experienced a tingling sensation she hadn’t felt for some time.
“Sorry to bother you. I live next door. I don’t mean this as rude as it sounds, but, well, what are you doing here?”
Cora positively beamed. “And who could blame you for asking. You must be new in town. I’m Cora Felton. I live here with my niece. Not
here,
I mean in Bakerhaven. And this isn’t her. She’s on her honeymoon. Not her, my niece. This is Becky Baldwin, attorney-at-law. She’s taking an inventory of Mr. Overmeyer’s estate prior to probating the will.”
He smiled at Becky Baldwin. “You’re the executor?”
Cora, not happy to see him smitten with the young attorney, jumped back in. “Of course she is. Unless Overmeyer’s great-nephew has some objection to her. Which I can’t imagine.”
“I can’t either. Well, let me know what he intends to do with the property.”
“Are you interested in it?” Cora asked.
“Lord, no. But if he’s going to put it on the market, I might buy it just to keep some kook from moving in.”
“Do you think that’s likely?”
“Well, look at the place. Only a kook would live here. So, you’re either going to get some wack job who thinks this is the cat’s meow, or someone who wants to tear it down and start over. I don’t need a construction site next door.”
“Of course not,” Cora purred.
He cocked his head at Becky Baldwin. “You were on TV.”
“Yes.”
“Claiming Mr. Overmeyer was murdered.”
“It’s not me that’s making the claim. It’s the medical examiner and the police.”
“Who would want to kill an old man like that?”
“Did you know him well?” Cora asked.
“Lord, no. I barely knew him. He wasn’t the type of guy you’d get to know. I don’t mean that as bad as it sounds. But the man didn’t want to be neighborly. He just wanted to be left alone.”
“Did he have many visitors?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“But you can see his house. From your front porch.”
“I didn’t pay much attention. Frankly, the place is an eyesore. I did my best to pretend it wasn’t there.” He held out his hand. “I’m George Brooks. I didn’t kill him to get his land.”
“Give him your card,” Cora told Becky. “Your business card. You got one with you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Good, let’s have it.”
Becky pulled a card out of her wallet, started to hand it over. Cora snatched it. “Pen.”
Becky gave her a look, fumbled in her purse. Came out with a ballpoint. Cora snatched that, too, scribbled on the card, handed it over. “There you go. Now you got Becky’s office number and my home number. You see anything out of the ordinary, give us a call.”
“I certainly will.” Brooks nodded, smiled. “Sorry to bother you. Got to get back to my wife.”
Cora’s face fell a mile.