The Luck Runs Out (8 page)

Stott had said he’d left Miss Flackley at the parking lot and walked home alone, but had he? Was it remotely possible the man could have deceived them all? Shandy thought back to the dinner party. Stott had been the success of the evening, no question about that, stuffing himself with Helen’s good food, basking in the admiration of the other ladies, acting almost frolicsome, for him. He’d never appeared more open, more genial, more likable. Shandy found it simply incredible that Stott could have been plotting the whole time to murder Miss Flackley, stuff her into the mash feeder, and kidnap his own sow with the farrier’s van. Yet when other possibilities were eliminated, the insane became the probable.

The hell with that. Other possibilities had not been eliminated. There must be scads of them kicking around. It was only a matter of finding out what they were. Corbin seemed an intelligent man; he wouldn’t be taken in by the falsely obvious. Would he?

S
HANDY HAD NOT OVERESTIMATED
the state policeman’s intelligence. As Lieutenant Corbin seemed on the point of departing, he paused and remarked ever so casually, “Mind if we take a quick look around the house, Flackley? I didn’t bring a search warrant with me, so you can refuse if you want.”

The former rodeo hand shrugged. “Guess that wouldn’t keep you out for long, would it? Sure, walk right in and make yourselves to home.”

“Just a second. I might as well see if there’s any word on the van.”

Corbin went back to his cruiser and picked up the radio transmitter. “Have Madigan bring a radio car to the Flackley house at Forgery Point.”

He gave marvelously accurate instructions. “No, nothing yet….Nothing on the van either, eh?…We’ve got a nephew of the deceased here. Mr. Flackley has no access to a phone and is anxious to be kept informed.”

He broke off the connection. “Okay, Flackley, you’re in business. Soon as anything turns up, we’ll send the news along by radio. In the meantime, you’ll have Officer Madigan for company.”

“Say, that’s real nice of you,” said Flackley, “but wouldn’t it be just as well if I rode back with you and went out with the search parties? Don’t seem right, everybody else out doin’ all the work and me sitting here twiddling my thumbs.”

“Try not to think of it that way, Mr. Flackley. Somebody’s got to keep the home fires burning you know. How are you fixed for food, by the way? Want Officer Madigan to pick anything up along the road?”

“No, I’m fine for now, thanks. Aunt Martha stocked up as soon as she found out I was coming.”

She’d done that, Shandy thought, and then some. The old-fashioned pantry shelves revealed a strange hodgepodge: cans of chili and frijoles next to Boston baked beans, bags of potato chips and pretzels rubbing labels with Quaker Oats and homemade preserves. The refrigerator—Lieutenant Gorbin wasn’t bashful about making a thorough search, warrant or no warrant—held the usual things like eggs and milk and cheese along with plastic-wrapped spareribs, barbecued chickens, and four six-packs of beer, one of them half empty. Miss Flackley had evidently made a touching effort to lay in the sorts of foods she thought her nephew might prefer.

This visit of his must have been a real milestone in her isolated life. Why in Sam Hill hadn’t she mentioned that she was going to have the fellow staying with her? Helen would have told her to bring him along, then she’d have had a bodyguard and this tragedy might never have occurred. Shandy voiced the thought.

“Aunt Martha would never do a thing like that,” Flackley replied. “She wouldn’t have wanted a roughneck like me trailing along when she went out in society.”

“We’re not society.”

“You would be to her, college professors and all. Being an educated woman herself, she could hold up her end okay, but shucks, I wouldn’t even know which fork to use.”

The word “fork” gave Shandy a small jolt. Just about this same time yesterday, he’d been sweating it out at the Carlovingian Crafters. Those identical forks with which Miss Flackley ate her last meal on this earth had been locked in the trunk of his car.

“Speaking of forks,” he said to Corbin, “I hope to God you’ve caught those two rats who held up the Carlovingian Crafters yesterday.”

The police officer looked at him curiously. “You own stock in the company or something?”

“No, but I helped carry out the loot. It was my wife they took hostage.”

“For Pete’s sake! Sure, Professor Shandy from Balaclava College. Funny I didn’t make the connection. This other business put the robbery clean out of my mind. You folks have been having quite a time of it, haven’t you?”

“You might say that,” Shandy replied grimly. “The most bizarre part of the whole story is that we were buying the silver partly because Miss Flackley was coming to dinner. My wife”—he chose his words carefully, in order not to offend the nephew—“wanted to set an attractive table.”

“Any special reason?”

“Because it was the first time we’d invited her, I suppose. Frankly, I sometimes find my wife’s motives a trifle obscure.”

Corbin grinned. “I know the feeling. Well, Professor, I wish I could tell you we’ve got those crooks safe in the slammer, but I can’t. We were sure we’d be able to scoop them right in with the good descriptions we had and the weight of the stuff they were trying to get away with, but they seem to have dropped clean out of sight.”

“Say,” Flackley broke in, “I saw that story about the robbery on the news last night. You don’t suppose by any chance they killed Aunt Martha so’s they could steal our van to haul away the gold and silver.”

“Taking along a thousand-pound pig in case they happened to want a ham sandwich on the way?” said Corbin mildly.

The nephew flushed. “Okay, I guess it was a dumb idea. The guys must be over the border by now, anyway. That’s how they’d do it out west, have a plane or a helicopter waiting, transfer the loot while they was holding the hostage, and be halfway to Mexico by the time you started thinking about setting up a roadblock. I just wish that van would turn up. You sure you don’t want me to go with you and help hunt?”

“I think you’d be more useful here,” Corbin replied with remarkable forbearance. “Officer Madigan should be along soon. You and she had better start going through your aunt’s papers. See if you can get a lead on anybody who might have had a grudge against her, owed money they couldn’t pay, or anything of that sort.”

Shandy could tell Corbin was just putting up a decent pretense of making Flackley believe he wasn’t being kept under surveillance, and he was sure the nephew realized it, too. However, Flackley seemed to be taking it well enough.

“Sure, I’ll be glad to. Hey, did I hear you call this Madigan a she? Can she cook?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Corbin, “but she’s the best shot on the force and a black belt in judo. She also tends to be a bit touchy on the subject of female stereotypes. Maybe you’d better open a can of chili.”

Flackley grinned. “Yeah, sounds like I better. You guys want some?”

“No, thanks. Here she comes now. We’ll leave you to settle the lunch question between you.”

A trim uniform and an air of brisk confidence suited Officer Madigan’s svelte figure and pixie face to perfection. Frank Flackley looked a good deal brighter at the prospect of being left in her custody. Lieutenant Corbin gave Madigan a quick briefing, then he and Shandy took off.

They stopped to make inquiries at the few houses around Forgery Point, but got nothing of value. Nobody knew Martha Flackley’s nephew was staying with her, but nobody seemed greatly surprised that he’d arrived. Flackleys had been going away and coming back for upward of two hundred years. They’d always been great ones for minding their own business, and they always seemed to have business to mind.

Martha Flackley had been a fine, honest, hard-working woman, not exactly popular but certainly well respected. Nobody could think of any reason why anybody would want to kill her. Nobody, seemed to cherish any illusion that she’d be fool enough to keep valuables in the house. If she did, why choose such a complicated way to get at them when it would be easy enough to break in any day while she was off on her rounds?

Shandy was relieved when at last Corbin gave up and headed back toward Balaclava Junction. The state policeman refused his offer to stop at the brick house for pot-luck, which was just as well because Helen and Iduna turned out to be waist-deep in frying doughnuts.

“Good lord!” Shandy exclaimed. “What are we running here, a Salvation Army shelter? How many are you planning to feed?”

Helen scooped a crispy round out of the seething kettle and laid it carefully on the draining rack. “So far we’ve had thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven what?”

“People wanting to know if anybody else has found Belinda. We’re handing out coffee and doughnuts to shut them up and keep them hunting. Want one?”

“I’d rather have a sandwich, if you don’t mind. Anything but ham.”

“Oh, Peter, haven’t you eaten?”

“Not since breakfast, whenever that was. No, don’t stop frying. I’ll find something.”

He poured himself a mug of coffee from the thirty-cup urn they’d set up on the kitchen table and foraged in the refrigerator for bread and cheese.

“This will do fine. Has Stott been by?”

“Twice so far. That man is distraught, Peter. He’s out tearing up and down the back roads in that old Buick of his, checking on the search parties then rushing back to see if we’ve had any word from you. If it weren’t for Iduna’s doughnuts, he’d be a basket case by now.”

The comely guest turned a fresh batch of dough out of the mixing bowl and began flattening it out on the floured breadboard with deft jabs of her rolling pin. “Can’t blame the poor man for worrying. I’m concerned myself, and I’ve never even met her.”

“You’d like Belinda,” Helen assured her. “She’s a lovely pig.”

“I like most pigs.”

Iduna had got the dough rolled out to the proper thickness and was popping the doughnut cutter up and down so fast it sounded like a tap dance.

“The only pig I never took to was an old gray hog my Aunt Astrid and Uncle Olaf used to have when I was little. Their pigpen was built right onto the outhouse, and as soon as he heard you open the door, that hog would start jumping up against the wall, making as if he was coming right in there after you. Aunt Astrid used to have to go with me and read me the Sears Roebuck catalog so I wouldn’t be too scared to do what I went for. Do you want me to take over at the kettle for a while, Helen?”

“No, I think we’ll finish this batch and call it quits. Why don’t you sit down and have a cup of coffee with Peter? You’ve been working your head off ever since you got up.”

“You don’t call this work?” said Iduna. “I love to cook. Besides, we had that nice drive down to the supermarket.”

“And a nice chat with Lorene McSpee while we were there,” sniffed her hostess. “Honestly, Peter, that woman’s a mental case.”

“Never saw anybody buy so much bleach water at one time in my life,” Iduna amplified.

“And she had two big bottles of that pine stuff you scrub floors with,” Helen went on, “and a jug of ammonia. We couldn’t help noticing. She plunked her carriage right in front of ours and started bombarding us with questions. So then I had to introduce Iduna, and then she had to know where Iduna came from and what she was doing here and how long she was going to stay and a good many other things that were none of her business. And then of course she got started on Miss Flackley.”

“And then,” chuckled Iduna, “I asked Mrs. McSpee if she was starting her spring cleaning. That wasn’t much help.”

“It was a perfectly natural thing to ask,” Helen said, her blue eyes crackling in annoyance at Lorene McSpee. “Peter, you would not believe the earful she gave us about how it was going to take her another month’s solid scrubbing to make the place livable. You know as well as I do that Mrs. Lomax and I went through Tim’s house like a dose of salts, and we’d been dropping in every week to wash up the dishes and whatnot. Either that McSpee woman was trying to get my goat, which she certainly succeeded in doing, or else she’s plain batty.”

“It could be a little of both,” said Iduna. “It does seem a shame, a nice man like Professor Ames having to put up with a pain in the neck like her. It’s not on account of her red hair, either, no matter what they say. My Aunt Astrid had hair as red as a fox’s tail and she was the loveliest woman you’d ever want to meet. She always had a kind word for everybody and a handout for any poor tramp that came along.”

“Speaking of tramps,” said Shandy, “I gather Tim’s been over here?”

“Oh yes,” said Helen, “he wandered along, wondering what the commotion was all about. He’d forgotten to hook up, as usual.” Professor Ames’s daughter had strong-armed him into getting a properly fitted hearing aid, but he seldom remembered to turn it on.

“Now, there’s a man could use a little smartening up,” said Iduna. “I’m surprised Mrs. McSpee doesn’t use up a little of her energy mending his jacket. He’s nice, though, isn’t he? He showed me a whole pocketful of snapshots of his new grandchild. I love babies.”

“Then you and Tim must get to know each other better,” said Shandy, flashing a glance of triumph at Helen. “Timothy Ames is much too fine a man to be saddled with that pest of a housekeeper. What he needs—”

As he was warming up to a good, broad hint, the knocker sounded. Helen sighed.

“There’s our thirty-eighth. Peter, would you answer the door? I’m all over doughnut grease.”

Shandy obeyed. On the doorstep stood Professor Stott. His eyes were red and bleary, his clothing disheveled. Though the man could hardly have lost any appreciable amount of weight in so short a time, he somehow gave the impression of being gaunt and hollow-cheeked.

“Shandy,” he blurted, “they’ve found the van.”

“And Belinda?”

Stott groaned and shook his head. “On the seat was a ham salad sandwich. With a bite out of it!”

He collapsed into the nearest chair and buried his face in his hands.

“Shandy, what am I going to do?”

All Shandy could think of was to give him a slap on the shoulder. “Come on, old friend, the fight’s not over yet. How about a drink?”