Darlene Franklin - Dressed for Death 02 - A String of Murders (6 page)

6

From: Elsie Holland ([email protected])

Date: Sunday, April 20, 9:35 PM

To: Peppi Lambert ([email protected])

Subject: Grades

Your name appeared on the recent dean’s list at Grace Gulch Community College.

Did you really write the essay that gave you an A and earned your internship at the Grace Gulch Herald?

Expect further communication from me on the subject.

Monday, April 21

Of course I didn’t get to start detecting right away.

The glazier met me at the store early Monday morning and promised to replace the glass on Tuesday. A small victory. And then I walked the floor and wondered what I was going to do about the spot where Spencer’s body had lain. Because blood did
not
come out, even when you could no longer see it. I’d seen enough television crime shows to know that.

I debated about whether or not to replace the wood where blood had seeped through the carpet. Maybe it was time to remove the carpet and return to a polished, oaken floor. Add hooked and braided rugs for a vintage feel. Bags of scraps hid in my closet, awaiting this excuse to rediscover the art of braiding a rug. I bet the Internet had some handy hints. I thought again. Probably not. It sounded like too much work, and besides, I could just imagine someone in high heels tripping on the rugs.

I was deep in thought, staring at the computer monitor in my office, when Dina arrived. She often stopped by on Mondays when she didn’t have work or school.

“Are you ready to go?”

“Hmm?” I turned away from the illustrated patterns. “Go? Where?”

“To investigate the murder, of course.” She grinned and flipped her neon pink hair in the direction of the empty display room. “This place looks so different when it’s empty.”

I came to the doorway and looked. I had to agree. Sun danced through dust motes that floated in through open windows. With my old-fashioned cash register, my store looked ready to open its doors to guests arriving by horse and buggy for a day in town. Not surprising, since the building had been constructed before statehood. Whatever remodeling I did, I wanted to keep that atmosphere. But I couldn’t do all that today and decided to take the day off. Freedom!

“We should let the police do the investigating.” I attempted to do the right thing.

Dina looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “When has that ever stopped the Wilde sisters?”

Her comment brought several of our more outrageous escapades to mind—like the time my sisters had dragged me on stage to dance the Cancan at last fall’s Land Run Days concert. I smiled. “Where shall we start?”

“I thought you would never ask.” Dina reached in the pocket of her big shirt—that strange style of shirt so big that two of her could fit in it—and pulled out a thin strip of paper. “I got Spencer’s address from the files at the MGM. I thought we could start there.”

I debated telling Audie our plans, but decided against it. He might say no. So we locked the back entrance and climbed into my Civic. The drive took only a few minutes, since Grace Gulch was only a mile from one end to the other. The condos, built at the turn of the millennium, nestled against the side of the hill that formed the gulch.

I parked in front of Spencer’s building and studied the facade. The cedar siding blended into the setting nicely. I had considered moving here before I bought my house, but the price was prohibitive. How had Spencer afforded it on a janitor’s salary?

“How are we going to get in?” I should have asked the question before.

“Ask the manager?” Dina said hopefully. “I know her from school. She’s as worried as we are about what happened. Murder doesn’t fit into the image of ‘Gracious Living at Grace Gulch Condominiums.’”

I shook my head at that. Getting the key from the manager might be a step above breaking and entering, but not by much. “No. I suspect it’s still illegal. We’re already in enough trouble if Reiner learns that we’re looking into Spencer’s death.”

“Can we at least peek in the windows?” Dina moved in the direction of Building C where Spencer’s unit was located.

“Don’t you feel all the eyes looking at us?” I did. Multiply Grace Gulch’s penchant for gossip tenfold in an enclosed community like the condos, and that might come close to describing the sense of unease I felt.

“Well then, what bright ideas do you have?” Sometimes Dina treated me like her doddering grandmother instead of her slightly older sister. Okay, a decade older.

“As a matter of fact, I do
have an idea. If Spencer was behind the robberies, where did he fence his stuff? I thought we could check with local pawn shops and see if any of them ever did any business with him.” I saw a protest forming on Dina’s lips and hurried ahead. “You can help by compiling a list of stolen items. They were in the police reports published in the
Herald
,
weren’t they? And maybe you can find a photo of Spencer somewhere? Find out if he ran an ad for his services in the paper?”

“I’m way ahead of you. Here’s the list.” Dina was speaking when someone tapped on our car window. We both jumped. A young woman with natural bright auburn hair waved at us. I knew her. Polly, Penny, Peppi, that was it—Peppi Lambert. She attended college with Dina; maybe she didn’t have any classes today either. I knew her from her involvement with the theater. She got to play the romantic interest, opposite Lauren Packer in a surprising turn as Mortimer Brewster—provided she was willing to remove most of the earrings that ran up and down her left lobe.

Dina rolled down her window.

“Hey, Dina, what are you doing in my neck of the woods? Are you thinking about moving here?”

“Maybe.” Maybe she’d like to move into her own place, but Dina knew the advantage of free rent at home. “I didn’t know you lived here.”

“Yeah, well, I might want to move somewhere else now.” Peppi nodded in the direction of Spencer’s unit. “That guy who was killed lived here, you know.” Her green eyes registered recognition. “Hey, he died in your store!”

Gulp. “That’s right. Did you know him?”

“I saw him every now and then. We didn’t talk much.” Peppi shrugged. “Can I interest you ladies in a cup of coffee?”

“No.” I wanted to get going.

“Yes.” Dina surprised me. What did she have in mind? She turned to Peppi. “Can you bring me back to Cici’s store later?”

We synchronized our watches, like spies in a movie—and planned to meet back at the store at noon.

I took advantage of the time to research pawn shops in the area and ran to Gaynor Goodies for something to eat. Dina would be hungry. At the stroke of noon, Dina waltzed into the store, followed by Peppi. It was a good thing that I had bought an extra croissant.

“I hope you don’t mind if Peppi comes along.” Dina peeked in the lunch bag. “Hey, great, turkey cranberry, my favorite.” She unwrapped the croissant and dove in. “Peppi’s interning at the
Herald
this spring. She wants to join us while we investigate. Be another Jane Marple.”

Peppi flashed white teeth. “I’m a big Agatha Christie fan.”

Perhaps I should have warned Dina not to talk about our plans. I didn’t think I needed to. Had word spread through the entire GGCC campus? Well, if so, it was too late to change anything. I put on my best smile and said, “Sure. Why not? And have a croissant before we head out.”

We studied the list of stolen items, as well as the ads Spencer ran for his cleaning service—no pictures.

“We checked the morgue, in case we had any kind of photo—no luck.” Dina sucked down her drink.

“Too bad.” I chewed the last bite of croissant and threw away the wrapper.

“No photograph—a sure sign of guilt.” Peppi ate the salad from inside the croissant with a plastic fork. “At least that’s what they say on television.”

“More likely, he didn’t need it for his business.” I avoided pictures myself, and that didn’t make me
guilty. “You’re reporters, both of you. How would you describe him?”

“I didn’t pay attention.” Peppi screwed up her face in concentration. “He was just around, you know?”

I remembered Spencer only too well. All I had to do was close my eyes, and I could picture his body lying on the floor of my store. The memory made me shiver, so I struggled to remember him from the MGM. A few details emerged. Height: five eight or five nine. Weight: a little chunky. Hair color: Salt and pepper gray. Between us, we came up with a decent description.

The three of us piled into my Civic. Dina opened the passenger side door in the front, then changed her mind and joined Peppi on the back seat. I felt a bit like a chauffeur, but I didn’t mind. I could ignore their chatter and let my mind wander. Soak in the April sunshine and the blooming flowers. April had to be one of the prettiest months in Oklahoma. Trees and flowers burst into life again after the long brown winter months, and temperatures didn’t climb too high. The investigation gave me an excuse to travel backcountry roads to places I did not ordinarily visit.

By mid-afternoon we had checked the pawn shops closest to Grace Gulch and debated whether or not we should head to the county seat in Chandler. We stopped at a café in Arcadia. I paused by the entrance, checking to see if the owners had added any more license plates to the wall since my last visit. Historical plates and out of state samples plastered the exterior by the door; there wasn’t room for one more. Did they replace them from time to time?

Minutes later, the three of us were seated at a polished pine booth. We asked for three spoons and one dish of their berry cobbler à la mode.

“No luck so far.” Dina’s pink hair looked as out of place in the quaint restaurant as snow in July. But given the café’s location on Route 66, the server must have seen stranger things. Dina took a bite of the cobbler before she continued. “I guess it was a long shot. Why should anyone remember Spencer?”

Someone
had known something about Spencer. The blackmail e-mail sprang to mind, but I didn’t want to discuss it in Peppi’s presence.

“Unless he came in all the time or they learned he was handling hot merchandise?” Peppi suggested.

“And no one would admit that.” Why would they?

Dina swallowed her bite of cobbler. “And the police have probably checked local pawnshops about the stolen merchandise already. A big zero.”

“Maybe Spencer wasn’t the robber after all.” I dug into the bowl for a blackberry. “Audie said he came with good references. No one suspected him. I would have heard—you know how the grapevine works.”

“Besides, he would have received one of those threatening emails,” Peppi spoke with assurance.

Dina and I stared at her.

“How did you know about that?” My sister demanded.

Too late to warn her not to talk.

A satisfied look flew across Peppi’s face. “I thought so.” She grinned. “I stopped by Gaynor Goodies myself. The whole town has heard about the emails by now. I received one myself, just last night.”

“You did!” Dina’s nose quivered like our dog Ralphie’s. “What is Elsie accusing you of?”

“Oh, she said I cheated on my essay and didn’t deserve my internship at the paper.”

Peppi spoke so carelessly that I couldn’t believe any truth existed in the accusation.

“So what did Elsie accuse Spencer of?” Like any good reporter, Peppi refused to lose the scent trail.

I held my breath. I didn’t want Dina spilling the beans about the second alias. I shouldn’t have worried.

“Nothing specific,” Dina sighed. “That’s the problem. I know!” She dabbed at a blueberry on her face with a napkin.

“Maybe he had a partner. Someone who could help him fence stuff,” Peppi offered her opinion.

“A partner.” I mulled that over. That possibility had come up before. I tried to remember where I had first run across Spencer. “His name always comes up when people mention they need a cleaning service.”

“Who uses—used—him?” Peppi asked.

“Good question!” Dina beamed at her friend as if she were her own personal discovery. In different circumstances, I would laugh at the notion of my teenage sister mentoring Peppi, who looked like she was in her mid-twenties. She had appeared in Grace Gulch in the fall and thrown herself into community life, between school, the paper, and the theater. She also worked part-time as a waitress at The Gulch, the town’s steak-and-potatoes restaurant.

Dina dug out the steno pad that she carried with her everywhere. “We know that he cleaned the theater. And I’ve seen him at the
Herald
offices. Cici, do you know what other businesses he cleaned for?”

I thought back to snippets of conversation from recent Chamber of Commerce meetings and gave her a few names. He cleaned half the businesses in our three-block downtown area, and it didn’t seem to matter if the business was owned by a Grace or a Gaynor. If you needed a janitor, you used Spencer’s services.

“But didn’t he clean homes, too?” Peppi pointed out. “What about those customers? Do we know any of their names?”