An Ex to Grind in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 5) Paperback – September 4, 2014 (15 page)

“Stone Hawke,” I tried that on for size, stepping closer to check out the clocks that were at my eyelevel. “That sure sounds like a made up name for a cop to me, something I’d find in an action-adventure novel. Did your mom like to read, Detective Hawke?”

The detail on each clock was intricate, incredibly so for something carved out of a tree. The wood was polished so much it looked plastic in the low light.

“Leave my mother out of this.” Hawke grumbled to himself as he stomped over to the window.

“Cooper.” I turned to find his steely gray eyes glaring at Hawke. It took him a second to return his focus to me. “I’d like a better look at these clocks, but it’s too dark in here. Can I open the curtains?” Although, with it raining outside, that probably wouldn’t help much.

He seemed to follow my train of thought. “How about a flashlight?” he offered, joining me at the wall.

“That’ll do.” I held out my hand.

He offered a palm-sized flashlight, handle out. When I reached for it, he pulled it back. “Be careful. If you flick this switch and push that button there, it’ll zap you.”

“Of course, it will. Even your flashlight is a weapon.” I shook my head. “I’m surprised it doesn’t shoot bullets, too.”

“It never hurts to be prepared.” He handed the flashlight over.

“Now you sound like your uncle.” I carefully switched it on, making sure I didn’t electrocute myself and add another fatality to Cooper’s case board.

I shined the light on one of the clocks. From what I could tell, it had wooden hands, dial, and pendulum. I’d bet the cuckoo and all of the decorations on it were made of wood, too, no plastic on this puppy. “What kind of wood do you think this is?”

“Walnut,” Cooper said without question.

“How come you’re so sure?”

“I’m a detective. They pay me to be sure.”

I peered at the next one over. The design was different, this one with leaf carvings—poison ivy from the looks of the three leaf bunches—instead of birds of prey. Again, it was highly polished with wood components. “There’s no dust on them.”

“Like I said,” Hawke came up behind us, making it two too many detectives in one spot, “she had a serious case of OCD. I’ve seen others with it. They get fixated on something, like washing their hands, and can’t leave home because they keep washing and washing. All these damned clocks must have kept the victim busy night and day.”

I sidestepped over to one of the clocks that wasn’t working, shining the light on it. Carved hunting dogs were affixed to it. But something about them made me uneasy. I looked closer, studying the carved pieces, noticing that they seemed furrier than most hunting dogs, more ferocious, posed in menacing positions with a young girl cowering between them. Then it hit me—they weren’t dogs, they were wolves. I shined the light back into the opening in the clock face to see if there were other wolf carvings glued onto the piece that must usually spin, but I couldn’t get a clear angle on what was hidden inside the clock. I nudged it with the flashlight, but it was stuck. I looked above the opening and noticed a skull at the apex mixed in with the leaf carvings and almost dropped the clock.

“What are you doing, Parker?” Cooper asked.

I swallowed my unease, getting back on track. “Trying to see something.” And trying to figure out why this one had stopped.

“Why are we wasting so much time on these stupid clocks?” Hawke snapped. “We should be going through her dresser, pulling up the carpet in her closet, looking for something worthwhile, not admiring her collection of cuckoo clocks.”

I wished good ol’ Stone would roll across the room and let some moss gather on him for a bit. Ignoring the new guy, I told Cooper, “I want to take this one off the wall.”

“Why?”

“To see if it’s battery operated,” which I very much doubted. What I really wanted to see was if she’d hidden anything inside the back panel, and having Cooper prove the clock was not battery driven seemed a good way to get him to open the back without showing my hand.

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure this is a mechanical clock that needs to be wound by pulling on the weight chains one at a time.” His gaze skated over the whole wall. “I’m betting all of these operate that way. They look like authentic Black Forest cuckoo clocks.”

“Humor me this once.”

“Just do it, Cooper,” Hawke attached himself to my side again, his arm bumping mine. The man seemed to have no perception of personal space, because he kept tromping over the boundaries into mine. “The sooner she looks at the clock, the sooner we can move on to more important areas in here.”

Cooper pulled a pair of neoprene gloves from his inner jacket pocket, tugging them on. “Which one?” he asked me.

I pointed at the one with the wolves.

With a slow, steady hand, Cooper lifted the clock off the wall. I shined the light on it. “Turn it around.”

He obeyed without comment, shifting the clock with care, keeping it level. I flicked the clasp holding the back panel in place. Inside there was no battery, just the mechanical workings, the cuckoo sleeve and mechanism, and what looked like German writing, which I guessed was the clock’s name or its maker’s signature. No hidden treasure, no skeleton keys, nothing but clock guts.

Cooper clasped the panel closed. “See,” he said, hanging it back on the wall, “you wind these kinds of clocks.”

“Show me how.” I knew how, but I wanted Cooper to wind it up. I was curious if it had wound down or was broken.

“I don’t think it’s a good—” Cooper started.

Hawke nudged me aside with his hip. “Like this.” He showed me, pulling one chain at a time.

“Careful, Hawke,” Cooper said, his face tight with what looked like disapproval.

When Hawke finished, the clock sat there, quiet and still as before.

“Did you wind it all of the way?” I asked.

“I think so,” Hawke said.

Cooper leaned closer, frowning at it. “I don’t think any of us should mess with it anymore. We don’t want to break it.”

“It appears to be broken already.” I looked over the rest of the clocks, counting five others that weren’t moving either. Were they broken, too, or just wound down?

“So the clock is broken,” Hawke crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “Big deal. That doesn’t tell us who killed the victim or why. We need to be looking for something in the bedroom, I’m betting.”

“Now who has OCD?” I asked, stepping back from the wall. I wanted to try winding the other clocks, but knew better than to suggest it with Detective Impatient-pants sulking in the wings.

How long did a wound clock take to unwind? If Cooper was right, they would each slow to a stop before long since Ms. Wolff wasn’t around to keep them moving.

“Why the interest in the clocks, Parker?” Cooper asked.

I didn’t know why. Maybe I was fascinated by them, by how many there were, by the reasoning behind none of them being quite the right time. I’d love to spend some time with a ladder and flashlight, looking over the workmanship and theme of each one, but I knew there was no way either detective would be having any of that today.

“It’s just odd,” I ended up telling him.

“Everything in this town is just odd,” Hawke said, trudging back toward the window. He pulled the curtains aside and frowned. “Always has been. I’ve never understood why you came back here, Cooper. You were on your way to becoming something big down in Rapid, following in my footsteps.”

“That’s not important right now,” Cooper said. I could hear how clenched his teeth were. Hawke’s attempt to bolster Cooper seemed to have pissed him off instead. “Parker, are we done with the clocks?”

For now. “Sure.”

I walked over to the chalk outline on the floor, skirting it to take a closer look at the old fashioned phone. “Why did you guys take a picture of the phone?” I asked Cooper.

“No reason. It’s standard procedure.”

I shined his flashlight on it, bathing it in a bright halogen glow. It reminded me of one I’d seen Bogie use in
The Big Sleep
, with its square base, pyramid-shaped body and curved hand piece. An industrial cord wrapped in black braided fabric ran out the back and down the wall, disappearing behind the end table. “Is there any way to confirm this is the phone she called me from?”

“It’s not the phone she used,” Cooper said.

“You’re certain?”

He nodded. “It’s just for looks. The plug in doesn’t fit the outlet in the wall.”

I pointed at the pen in Cooper’s breast pocket. “Can I borrow that?”

“You’re not going to stomp on it, too, are you?”

“Just give me the damned pen.”

Cooper obliged.

I pulled my sleeve down over my hand, using it as a glove so that I could pick up the handset. It felt solid, heavy in my hand. I held it close to my ear without touching it. Sure enough, there was no dial tone. I used the pen to spin the rotary dial. It spun back to start position, moving slow like the one my grandmother had owned back when I was a kid.

I handed Cooper back his pen. “So she kept it for decoration only, you think?”

“That’s my guess,” Cooper stuffed the pen back into his pocket.

Detective Hawke shifted over by the window. “So we have authentic German wall clocks and a genuine antique phone. We’re really cooking on finding clues now. If this is your usual modus operandi, it’s no wonder it’s taking you so long to solve these murders.”

I ignored Hawke, turning my back on him. “She liked antiques,” I told Cooper.

He nodded.

“And not the cheap ones. Do you have any idea what Ms. Wolff did for money?” Because Social Security checks did not cover the cost of these pieces.

“From what I can tell so far, she never had a taxpaying job.”

Never? “Was she a widow?”

“There’s no marriage license on record for her.”

“She must have come from money then.”

“I’m still working those details out.”

What did that mean? That he couldn’t find anything about Ms. Wolff in any official records?

I thought about asking him to clarify, but something in the way he kept shooting gunslinger glares at his partner made me hold my tongue. I wanted to know the lowdown on the history between Cooper and Hawke.

“Let’s move to her bedroom,” I said. That should make Hawke happy.

“Finally!” The other detective rubbed his hands together. “Now we’ll get to the bottom of things.”

I followed Cooper through the doorway. The bedroom was about ten square feet smaller than the living room. A twin-sized bed split the room in half, with two doors on the opposite wall. One doorway led to the bathroom, the other door to the closet I had seen in the photos Harvey and I looked at in Cooper’s house yesterday. The bedroom walls looked gray in the dimness. I flicked on the overhead light, but the room still appeared shrouded.

Detective Hawke skidded to a halt inside the bedroom door, whistling through his teeth as he looked around. “You’re kidding me. More clocks in here, too? This dame had a real hang-up.”

Freesia, the owner of the Galena House, hadn’t been telling tall tales when she talked about how many clocks Ms. Wolff had. The wall on my right was covered with them. How did the woman sleep with all of the ticking?

My focus zeroed in on the dresser. I skirted the bed, wanting to see Layne’s picture with my own eyes, yet dreading it at the same time. Sure enough, there it was stuck in the mirror frame, the photo I’d taken of Layne.

In it he held up his glass dinosaur egg sculpture in front of his smiling face, Aunt Zoe’s workshop in the background. I could see the reflection of my own arm and the camera flash in the old family heirloom mirror hung on the wall behind Layne. The snapshot of me that Aunt Zoe always kept stuffed in the mirror’s corner was just visible in Layne’s picture.

The photo within a photo scene reminded me of standing in a house of mirrors, how my reflection went on and on. Did the irony of a snapshot stuck in a mirror that was showing in the background of another snapshot stuck in Ms. Wolff’s dresser mirror mean anything?

Even though Cooper had told me the photo of Layne was here in her bedroom, seeing it made my hands clammy. Pictures tucked into a bedroom mirror seemed like such a personal thing. Why was it
my
son? Why was his picture the only one on her dresser? How had she gotten that photo?

Did this have anything to do with Rex being in town? Was Ms. Wolff somehow related to Rex? I didn’t remember him talking about having relatives in the hills, but then again we really didn’t waste a lot of time talking back then.

“Are you okay?” Cooper asked, coming up beside me without bumping into me like his clod-footed partner.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I can’t make sense of it.”

“That’s unfortunate, because I was hoping this was a clue to why she called you. It seems too odd to be happenstance.”

“Can I have that picture back?” I asked.

“We’ll want to keep it in evidence for some time after we finish with the crime scene details.”

“Can you make a copy of it?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Cooper said.

“Hey, Coop, did your camera guy get a shot of this?” Detective Hawke pointed into the closet.

“The heads?” Cooper asked.