Barbara Graham - Quilted 05 - Murder by Sunlight (24 page)

“We didn’t have a relationship.” Pingel looked up.

Tony noticed a flash of anger on Pingel’s face. “All right. Let’s start easy. How long did you and your family live next door to the Tibbleses?”

Pingel sipped his coffee. “I’d say about five years.”

“Did Candy babysit for you often?”

“Yes, almost every day. She and the little guy got along just fine.” Pingel paused. “She didn’t do anything wrong. The boy’s days were numbered from the beginning.” Pushing his handkerchief under his glasses, he wiped away a tear. “Born with too many problems to count.”

“I’ve heard some stories that contradict your account.” Tony pretended to study a file. “What about those?”

“I’m ashamed to say that right after the boy died, my wife lied, and I let her.” Pingel blew his nose. “It seemed to make my wife feel better to have someone to blame for the boy’s death. If she didn’t use poor Candy, she was bound to turn on me or herself. I was afraid she’d do something rash.”

“But you didn’t try to correct the story.” Tony clenched the pen, breaking another one. He was going to have to find stronger pens or find another outlet for his anger.

Pingel waved his hands, forgetting he held the coffee cup, and black coffee flew through the air. “Yes, yes, we did. Right after the funeral we apologized to Candy. Gave her some cash to add to her college fund.”

“College?” Tony hadn’t heard anything about plans for higher education.

“Well, she was planning to become a hairdresser. We said we’d give her a good recommendation as a babysitter, if she needed one.” Pingel’s words tumbled over each other. “But the gossip had started and couldn’t be stopped. It got worse and worse, and my father-in-law added false details and spread the story, and we finally moved away just to shut him up.” Pingel fell silent. “We thought it would be better for us and Candy if we moved away.”

“Where is your wife now?”

“I’d guess she’s gambling.” Pingel frowned. “I called earlier, and the babysitter said she’d taken off for the weekend. She does it about four times a year. I can give you a phone number for her.”

Tony called Mrs. Pingel and learned her location. Thanks to a cooperative deputy in the North Carolina casino town, Tony verified in only a few minutes that Mrs. Pingel had been at the poker tables during the time of the murder.

After Pingel left his office, Tony felt a deep sense of relief. He believed Pingel’s story, especially after he asked Sheila to check it with Mr. Yates. The bitter man admitted the truth, and Tony felt they could cross the Pingel family from the suspect list.

“Let’s see what other dots we can connect.” He stood in front of his white board, talking with Sheila. “Opal Dunwoody claimed she saw a woman walking toward Candy’s house.” Tony checked his notebook. “Then they argued.”

Sheila didn’t look convinced the story meant anything. “Opal would not have been able to see if the woman went into the house through the front door or walked around the side toward the garden and greenhouse area.”

Tony agreed. “Or neither. It’s possible she talked to Candy out front and then left. Opal was pretty vague about the time.”

“And unless her glasses were clean, which I seriously doubt has been the case for years, she could have been watching through a smudge as thick as a curtain.”

“They certainly were not clean when I talked with her.” Tony suspected cataracts caused Opal all kinds of visual confusion that, mixed with some greasy dirt on her glasses’ lenses, would render her almost blind.

“And as for the day”—Sheila fanned herself with her hand—“she’s a nice old lady, but she spends lots of time in her front yard watching the neighbors and the traffic over at the convenience store. Even as mentally sharp as she is, Monday and Wednesday would be easy to mix up.”

“True.” Tony gestured with the marking pen. “I don’t think we can ignore or confirm the events seen from her angle.”

Sheila studied the board. “Who took the code book? And how did they even know it existed?”

Tony’s shoulders twitched. “I’m guessing our victim, the something-less-than-brilliant blackmailer, probably let the information loose herself. Can’t you just hear Candy going on about her code book? She could have waved the notebook in their faces, telling each one how she’d know if someone didn’t pay on time.”

“Silence at any cost.” Sheila nodded. “It’s the blackmailer’s job security. Can you imagine having something you needed to keep hidden so desperately that you handed over your family’s grocery money to Candy Tibbles every month?”

“Thankfully, no.” Tony considered that particular situation well out of his area of personal expertise. But all people, including himself, were fallible. “We all like to think we’re too smart, too lucky, or in control of our destiny, but it might not be true.”

Sheila nodded her agreement. “Especially when someone is fighting an unseen enemy. The story doesn’t even have to be the truth. Think of the mayor’s situation, paying blackmail even though he didn’t need to. The same thing could happen to you. I could claim I saw
you
steal something at the grocery store. Even if it was untrue, the accusation would tarnish your reputation. Maybe you’re afraid you won’t be reelected. You don’t want your family to suffer from embarrassment or your joblessness, and so I suggest you give me your lunch money every week and say I’ll keep my silence.” Sheila frowned. “Maybe Candy was smarter than we give her credit for.”

“Or maybe not. Maybe one day you want a raise. Greed raises the cost of silence. The payment increases.” Tony lifted an eyebrow. “What if I can’t pay? Trying to save the family budget, Theo begins packing me a lunch instead of having me buy my own.”

“I’m screaming at you, telling you to give me the money,” Sheila jumped in. “I don’t care where you get the cash.”

“So I whack you in the head to shut you up,” Tony said. “It works. You fall down and all I care about is you aren’t yammering at me anymore.”

“So,” Sheila said, smiling. “What did you hit me with?”

“I wish I knew.” Tony shook his head. “It was hard, cylindrical, and smaller in diameter than any of the tools we found under the house.”

“Who was our guy with the map?” Tony himself had almost forgotten the odd report. “On a cul-de-sac with only four houses, it sounded like he couldn’t find the right address.”

“Maybe he didn’t have any trouble finding the right house but was just covering his actions. Spying on your neighbors is a sport played everywhere. Spying on strangers is encouraged as a crime deterrent.” Wade had joined the impromptu meeting.

“So he could have as easily been watching Mrs. Vanderbilt as Candy.” Tony thought the young mother was much easier on the eyes, but probably not fascinating to watch for long periods of time, and Candy might have been.

“What about the surveillance video from the convenience store? Maybe it caught the license plate.” Sheila flipped through her notebook. There is almost always traffic at Kwik Kirk’s.

“Maybe he went into the store for a snack.”

Tony sprang to his feet. “The video. I forgot all about it. Kirk gave it to me days ago and then I went back to Candy’s place.”

“Hopefully you put it some place safe.” Sheila gave him a smile. “And still have it.”

He had. The moment he remembered it, he knew he’d shoved it in the briefcase he kept in the Blazer and almost never used.

It didn’t take long to find the information they were looking for. Only one man wore the hat described by Roscoe and Veronica. A few minutes later, the mysterious man with the binoculars was finally positively identified as Ulf Erikson, a botanist from North Carolina.

It wasn’t much after that when Sheila found him sitting in the car on a back road and called in her sighting. She said he appeared to be studying the back of the Tibbles’s property. As expected, he had a pair of powerful binoculars, a camera equipped with an extra-long lens, and a notebook on the seat next to him.

Tony said, “I’d like to have him in my office.”

“I’d be more than happy to arrange it.” True to her word, only a few minutes passed before Sheila ushered Erikson into Tony’s office. “I checked him for weapons, and he didn’t do anything stupid when I suggested he come with me.” Aggravation laced her words. “He did whine the whole way here. Not a pleasant sound at all.” She took a step toward Tony’s open door.

Tony raised a finger, signaling for her to wait.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Erikson said. “I heard the boy had discovered a beetle-resistant strain of beans. I just wanted to talk to him about it.”

“Interesting, but the last I heard, no one uses binoculars for conversational purposes.” Tony found the man annoying and a liar, but he couldn’t imagine Erikson was likely to bash Candy in the head and leave her to die in an overheated greenhouse. Why would he bother to pull the tarps away and leave her in the full heat of the sun? Unless . . . “Did you sneak into the garden and get caught?”

“Caught? Sheriff, you make it sound like I was doing something illegal.” The weasel’s eyes moved constantly, hiding something.

In spite of his bluster, he wasn’t convincing. Movement of his Adam’s apple showed he was swallowing convulsively. Tony relaxed in his chair, toying with his pen. “I’m convinced the law is still on the side of the homeowner. Trespassing is frowned upon.”

“I knocked.” Erikson fidgeted a bit. “When no one came to the door, I walked around back to see if someone was in the garden.”

“And?” Tony leaned forward abruptly.

Erikson flinched at the sudden movement. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“So you left?”

“Well, not right away. I did take a few photographs.” He seemed to be strangling on his words. “I needed to be able to compare the plants with their later appearance.” His words ground to a halt.

“But these are not your plants. Are they?” Tony pointed his pen at the man.

The botanist meshed his fingers tightly together and leaned forward. An expression of great intensity pulled his lips tight against his teeth. After a few moments, he shook his head.

“So you
were
trespassing?”

Erikson nodded.

“Did you go into the greenhouse?” Tony guessed some of the man’s reluctance to tell the truth came from what he witnessed in there.

Erikson’s head swung back and forth like the clapper in a bell. “I heard the insects and looked in.” He suddenly gasped as if he’d been holding his breath. “It was horrible. They were feasting, but I couldn’t help her. I mean, she was obviously dead, and I didn’t want to be involved.”

“Why not make an anonymous phone call?” Tony could not understand the way the man thought. “If you weren’t doing anything wrong, how could you just leave any person, a human being, in the dirt, in that situation? Have you no feelings, not a whit of conscience?”

Silence. One shoulder twitched.

It was all the answer Tony received. He glanced past the man to Sheila. “Get copies of his ID and cut him loose. I want to be able to locate him if we decide we need him after all.”

“I think he’s a liar and a potential thief,” Tony snapped, adding more documents to the ever-increasing file on Candy’s murder. “What do you think I can charge him with?”

“Do you think he ever encountered Candy?” Wade leaned against the door frame.

“Yes. I do.” Tony didn’t know why he was so certain the man had not told them everything he knew. “I think he’d been staking out the greenhouse for several days before she died, and he’s still doing it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe rivalries in botany operate under special rules. I assume they are much the same as in other industries, though. Whoever crosses the finish line first will win.”

“Let’s say he’s telling the truth.” Wade stared off into the distance. “He went out there, and Candy told him what? That Alvin wouldn’t be home for a while, or that he didn’t live there any more, or that for fifty dollars she’d give him a couple of plants, thinking Alvin wouldn’t miss them?”

Tony sensed Wade was on to something. “But he comes back with the money and doesn’t find her. He’s angry. She’s promised him one thing and doesn’t deliver. He stomps out to the garden, and she taunts him and starts to walk away. He picks up a hoe or something and swings it like a baseball bat and hits the back of her head.”

“She falls into the greenhouse. Or maybe that’s where he struck her. He can see she’s still breathing and panics. He begins ripping the tarps off the glass ceiling and stops when he sees he’s making the situation worse. The temperature is increasing, and he hears someone coming.”

Tony rubbed his bald scalp. “And?”

“Panicking, he slinks away and tosses the hoe under the porch. But that’s all wrong, because the weapon wasn’t the hoe, and nothing under the porch was the right size. He has to pretend he’s still looking to talk to her and Alvin.” Wade appeared less certain.

Tony took up the thread Wade had started. “He slips away so he can come back, pretending to just be arriving. Maybe the weapon was under there with the other tools, and he took it later. Maybe he even intended to call for help, saying he arrived and found her. That he was just doing a good deed.”