Hanging by a Thread (16 page)

Betsy replied equally softly, “What have you heard about me?”

“That you’re poking around in the old Schmitt double murder.”

“Do you object to that?”

Surprisingly, he grinned. “If you can prove once and for all who it was who killed Angela Schmitt and her husband, I’ll be the happiest cop in the state.”

“So it’s all right with you if I continue to look into things?”

He sighed. “I’m not empowered to stop you. But I do want to warn you, this involves someone who has murdered twice. Someone who apparently still has the gun he used on Angela and then on Paul. You haven’t got the training or the experience to deal with the kind of person who would do something like that.”

“Thank you for being concerned—no, I really mean that. I know you think I’m a silly, interfering amateur, and in a way you’re right. There are times I wonder what on earth makes me think I can do this. But it keeps happening, and I keep getting it right. If I do find things out, or have questions, may I come to you?”

He made a face and seemed about to say no, but changed his mind. After all, she had solved a couple of baffling cases. “What kind of questions?”

“Did you think at first, when Angela was shot, that Paul had done it?”

He shrugged. “You always look at the husband. He seemed nice enough, and he’d never been arrested for anything, but I never liked that smirk of his.”

“What about his alibi?”

“Aw, it was okay, but I would’ve liked it better if someone had come into the gift store and seen him. There were some other oddities, too, but not enough to make an arrest. Then someone beat the crap out of him and then shot him with the same weapon ...” He tugged a freckled ear. “That put paid to any idea he did it. Except ...” He held out one hand, palm down, and waggled it slightly.

“What?” asked Betsy.

“If you weren’t a damn civilian ...” He said, and stopped yet again.

She decided not to argue with him. After all, she was just a damn civilian, with no badge or private eye license. She straightened in her seat and took a deliberate bite of her chili. It reminded her of her mother’s chili; it even had elbow macaroni in it. She took a sip of milk, then dipped her spoon into the chili again.

“All right, all right,” he grumbled as if she had been arguing with him. “There were powder bums on his trousers where he was shot, on his head, and on his hands. This means the gun went off very close up. This tends to mean self-inflicted wounds.”

“But the beating wasn’t self-inflicted, surely.”

Malloy nodded. “I know. I thought maybe someone came and beat him up for killing his wife, and Schmitt shot himself after that person left, maybe with an eye to framing whoever beat him up. But who? And then where’s the weapon? It’s gone. It’s never been found.”

Betsy leaned forward to ask quietly, “Is it possible he could have thrown it out the door or out a window before he died?”

Malloy shook his head. “With a bullet in his brain? Not a chance. He was dead before he hit the floor.” He shrugged. “Anyway we went over the whole property with a fine-tooth comb. The only possible conclusion is that someone shot him, and took the gun away with him.”

“The same gun that shot Angela.”

“Very probably. We never recovered the slug that killed her. It went out the window and, for all I know, fell into the back of a passing pickup and was carried away.”

Betsy smiled incredulously. “Is that possible?”

He shrugged. “All I know for sure is, six of us looking damn hard couldn’t find it. But we recovered the shell casings and they’re all the same caliber and the mark of the firing pin on all of them is identical.” He glanced around the café, but the men on the stools had turned away again.

“How conclusive is that?”

“Pretty good. Not as good as the marks the rifling of the gun barrel would’ve left on the slug, but pretty indicative.”

Betsy took another bite of chili. “So what did you decide about the gunpowder burns?”

“That it was close-in fighting. A struggle for the gun.”

“Did Paul Schmitt own a gun?”

“Yeah.” He looked uncomfortable, and added, “See what I mean? This whole case has screwy parts to it. The gun was registered, and it’s the same kind of gun that was used in the murders. And it’s gone, too.”

“Did Paul Schmitt report it missing before the murders?”

“No. He told us he had a gun when we first talked to him, but when we went to his house for a look at it, he couldn’t find it. He said he had no idea how long it had been missing. I thought he’d tossed it away after using it on his wife, and I wanted to arrest him right then, but there just wasn’t enough evidence.”

She asked, “How sure are you that Foster Johns did it?”

For the first time, Malloy spoke in full voice. “Damn sure! He was on the scene of Angela’s murder at the time it happened. We’ve got three or four witnesses to that. He has a half-assed alibi for Paul’s murder, but I think he could have rigged that. I hauled him in and grilled him good, but he wouldn’t break. So I had to let him go. I wish he’d leave town—just seeing him walking around free grates me hard.”

There was a little murmur that ran around the café, and one of the men sitting at the counter grinned at the other.

Malloy left, Betsy hastily finished her chili and went to the checkout counter. There was a bowl of apples and pears sitting by the cash register, so she chose the biggest apple and paid for it with her bill. As she stuffed it into a pocket, she looked around the little café, and there in a back booth she saw Foster Johns looking like a man waiting to be hanged.

B
etsy went out into the chill air and up the street, past the beauty parlor and the bookstore. She paused a minute to look in the pet shop window. A lop-eared rabbit nosed about its low, wide cage, and two white kittens with blue eyes and just a hint of darkening on their ears and tails were tangled into a shifting, complex ball in their big cage. One was trying to chew the ear off the other. A bearded lizard in an adjacent aquarium was watching them with a beady eye.

She went in. The shop was warm, the air moist and redolent of small animals and pet foods. Canary and parakeet noises filled the air. The aisles were crowded with items—it was a small shop, but tried to meet the needs of a large variety of pet owners. Betsy went down the aisle that catered to cat owners, then to the front counter, where a curly-headed blond was allowing a man in a raincoat to hold a friendly parrot on the edge of his hand. The bird was gray with a red tail.

“... two thousand,” the shop owner was explaining.

“Does that include the cage?”

“No, a good cage will run you another thousand. Plus you’ll want some toys. African greys get bored easily, and they have a poor response to boredom.”

“Hmmm,” said the man.

“I looove you,” crooned the parrot in the blond’s voice, and bent its head, asking to be tickled on the neck. The man complied and the bird made a low chuckling sound of pleasure.

“He’s nearly two and already has a vocabulary of about a dozen words,” said the shop owner. “We call him Gray Goose, but you can change that.”

Betsy, thinking of Godwin being unhappy in front of customers back in her shop, and Foster being desperately sad in the café, said impatiently, “I can’t find the lams Less Active.”

“It should be right beside the Science Diet Hair-ball.”

“The Science Diet is there, but no Iams.”

“I’ll clip those for you if you like,” said the shop owner to the man, who was now lifting the compliant bird’s wing. She went back for a look and agreed there was no lams Less Active on the shelf. “I’ve got some down the basement, can you wait a minute?”

“Sure,” said Betsy. She went back to watch the man ask the parrot to step from hand to hand as if on a Stairmaster, which it did obediently.

But when four minutes had passed and the woman hadn’t come back, Betsy went to the open basement door for a look. The steps were thick old wooden boards. There was only silence coming from down there.

Cautiously, Betsy started down. There were shelves and stacks of crates forming crooked aisles on the floor. The lighting was of the harsh fluorescent kind, but too widely spaced, so the place was full of sharp shadows.

Betsy heard a rustling and dragging sound from halfway down a dark aisle and started toward it. Then she stopped and stared. “Hey!” she said.

“What?” said the shop owner, turning around. She had two seven-pound bags of dry cat food in her hands.

“The basement of this place is
huge
!” Betsy could see through the backless shelf the pet food had come off of. There was a wall made of rough old boards, but the boards were badly warped, and the ceiling light shone through them into a big space beyond. And judging by where the basement stairs were, the board corresponded to the wall of the pet shop above.

“Oh, sure,” said the shop owner. “My store is the middle of three in the Tonka Building.”

“Tonka Building?” Like most people, Betsy went around gawking upwards at buildings only on vacation. The buildings on this block formed a single solid row, and the entrances to each store were different in design, so she hadn’t realized three were in a single building. Betsy’s own building had three shops in it, but the building had open space on either side, making the arrangement obvious. Here, the Tonka Building was up against the next building, which was a beauty shop, which was next to the Waterfront Café. Were the beauty shop and café in a single building? Betsy had no idea.

This was for a moment merely interesting.

But if the pet shop was the
middle
of three, why, “Then Heritage II on the comer, your Noah’s Ark, and Excelsior Bay books next door are all in the Tonka Building.”

“Sure. And a CPA, a dentist, and a chiropractor have offices on the second floor.”

“Are you saying it’s possible to go from one of the three stores to another without going out in the rain?”

“Not through the shops themselves.”

“Not now ...” agreed Betsy, pausing hopefully.

“Not ever, there never were any doors,” said the shop owner, handing Betsy a bag of cat food and picking up a third. She headed for the stairs. “Of course, there used to be gates between the board walls down here, but they were nailed shut years and years ago.”

“Gates? There are
gates?
Are these walls original? Were there always gates in them? How long ago were they nailed shut, do you know?”

The woman stopped on the third step and turned to look at Betsy, surprised at her interest. Then she looked around the basement, thinking. “Well, it was divided like this when I started Noah’s Ark, and that was nine years ago. I’m pretty sure the walls between the basements went up shortly after the auto dealership moved out of the corner store, and that happened in the early sixties, I think. The building itself dates to the forties.”

“But when were the gates nailed shut?”

“They wouldn’t open when I moved in, so longer ago than nine years.”

“Oh.” Betsy looked back along the shelves. They were sets of shelves rather than one long shelf, but were put right up against one another. They were made of dark gray metal with X bracing at the ends. They ran the parallel to the walls and formed two aisles. They were sturdy, which was good, because the one against the wall was crowded with bags and cans of pet food. That would, however, complicate the life of someone trying to come through from the gift shop. He would not only have to pry out the nails in the gate, he’d have to unload a shelf and crawl across it, then put it all back together again on his way back.

“Hold on a second, okay?” said Betsy. She went quickly to the other side of the basement and found the situation even worse for a potential crawler-through; the shelves were laden with heavy and frangible glass aquariums and goldfish bowls, big boxes of filtering kits and lights, and weighty bags of gravel.

“Come on, Betsy, if Goose hasn’t bitten Mr. Winters, I think I’ve got a book-balancing sale waiting for me.”

“All right,” sighed Betsy.

But upstairs, watching Mr. Winters write out a very large check while his new friend chewed the buttons off the epaulets of his raincoat, she had another idea and said, “Excuse me, Nancy, but may I ask you something?”

“Certainly, in a minute. That’s right, Mr. Winters, with tax that comes to two thousand, two hundred thirty-six dollars and fifty cents.”

“Those shelves down in your basement. They’re very nice. Where did you get them?”

“At Ace Hardware, right across the street.”

Betsy nodded. Ace Hardware’s building had suffered a fire and the store had pulled out of the building two years ago, but people talked about the hardware store as if it were still there.

Nancy continued, “I’m sure they’re a standard item, so if you want to drive over to Highway Seven and 101, you’ll probably find them at the Ace there. They’re nice, because they’re strong, easy to set up, and on sale. I can’t remember how much they were, not that remembering would help, I’ve had them for about three years. Before that I only had a single row of wooden shelves down the middle of the room.”

“Really?” said Betsy, and Nancy looked up from writing the sales slip, surprised that Betsy was pleased. “Listen, would you mind terribly if I went down for another look? Thanks, Nancy!”

Before Nancy could object, Betsy went back down the stairs. Over on the side with the aquariums—“ Why didn’t she put these in the middle?” grumped Betsy—she began very carefully lifting items off the shelf where the gate was. The shelves blocked access to the gate, but Betsy leaned into the shelf opening where the gate’s handle would be. There were about two inches of space between the gate and the back of the shelf. Betsy grasped the handle—a thick wooden C that didn’t operate a latch—and pulled gently. The gate didn’t give. She pulled harder. Still no give. The reason why was right there, too; she could see the slotted backs of rusty metal screws that held the edge of the gate against its frame. Just like Nancy had said: nailed shut. Well, screwed shut.