It Takes Two to Strangle (7 page)

Mrs. Chenworth swiveled her head at the sound of the front door’s jingling bells. She stopped mid-sentence and shouted at a ridiculously high decibel level, “Damon, did you hear?”

Damon stepped inside. “I assume you mean about the murder at the fairgrounds. I came to talk to Cynthia about it in case anyone asks.”

“If anyone asks?” Mrs. Chenworth countered with incredulity. “It’s all anyone has been talking about. But did you hear what the police found this morning?”

Damon shot Cynthia a quizzical look. Cynthia surreptitiously pointed a finger back at Mrs. Chenworth. Damon moved an armchair from the waiting area closer to the women and refocused on Mrs. Chenworth.

Before he could speak, she blurted out, “a clothesline!” Mrs. Chenworth started rattling out loose words. “A clothesline. That’s what the killer used. Did you know he was strangled? I have my sources and I knew that this Jovanovic fellow was strangled. Jovanovic. What nationality is that? Czech? Hungarian? It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I knew he was strangled and then just this morning, they found out it was a clothesline. Can you believe it? I came straight here to tell everyone. I didn’t even stop for my morning coffee.”

Damon suppressed a laugh. He’d like to see how much faster a caffeinated Mrs. Chenworth could speak. He put up a hand to stop her—he knew from experience that if he waited for an opening to talk, he could be there indefinitely. It did the trick and Damon pictured her as a trained parrot that talked incessantly but halted immediately on command.

Damon asked, “Are you saying the police found a clothesline that they know killed Lirim Jovanovic?” He was careful not to mention the two different ligature marks.

“Not the clothesline itself, but the clothesline that the clothesline came from.”

Damon raised his eyebrows in confusion.

Mrs. Chenworth saw them, registered the query and carried on without missing a beat. “What I mean is there’s a clothesline. One of those carnival workers did her laundry at the Laundromat in Oakwood, but she was too cheap to use the dryers. So she hung her wet garments between two of the carnival trailers.”

Damon wondered if the woman who hung her clothes out to dry was the same person who directed him and Gerry to Lirim’s trailer the day before the fair started. She had been carrying a laundry sack.

Mrs. Chenworth’s voice boomed over Damon’s inner thoughts, relegating them to a corner like a stern teacher. “So this woman, the cheap one, dried her laundry and took in her clothes, but left the clothesline lying on the ground! Can you believe it? Right where the murderer could pick it up!”

Damon wondered if Gerry had known about the clothesline during dinner the previous evening. Probably not. More likely, the torrential rain had prevented it from being found right away. “So did the clothesline have skin on it or something?” Damon asked. “How do the police know it’s the murder weapon?”

“No, no, no,” Mrs. Chenworth said in a pejorative manner. “Aren’t you listening? They found the clothesline. The rest of it I mean. So there’s this woman who dried her laundry on the clothesline.” As she repeated the line, Damon thought the parrot analogy even more apropos. “She must have realized it was still outside and started to coil it up. Only when she gets to the end it’s frayed. Well, not frayed in fact, because I heard it was nylon not rope. But it seems to her that it looks shorter than usual. So she told the police. Can you believe it? She had to tell them!”

“Okay, I get it,” Damon said, finally understanding. “So the killer cut a couple of feet from the clothesline to use as a garrote and left the rest.”

“I don’t know what a garrote is,” replied Mrs. Chenworth, “but if you mean that he used a piece of clothesline to strangle that carnival owner, then yes, that’s exactly what happened. Case closed.”

“Case closed?”

“Now that they know what killed him all they have to do is arrest the person who cut the cord.”

“Did anyone see a person cutting the clothesline?” asked the pedicurist.

“I’m not sure, dear,” admitted Mrs. Chenworth a bit sheepishly.

Damon had to hand it to Mrs. Chenworth. She might be boisterous, but she had a talent for being the recipient of a preponderance of Hollydale’s gossip.

 
Mrs. Chenworth recovered and started a tirade about how “cold-blooded” strangulation was as a method of murder. Damon knew cold-blooded animals took on the temperature of their surroundings. He pictured Mrs. Chenworth turning a fiery red in the July heat and smiled.

Damon broke out of his reverie when he heard Mrs. Chenworth switch topics.

“That Lirim’s daughter and her good-looking boyfriend went down to breakfast at the Poorboy,” she said.

Damon stared at Mrs. Chenworth. “The Poorboy? Do you know when they left?”

“Of course, Damon. I gave them directions a few minutes before you arrived.”

Damon shouted “thanks” and bolted for the door. He felt a strong urge to see Clara. Ever the gallant knight, he envisioned Clara looking longingly into his eyes as he uncovered rock-solid proof that placed her above police suspicion.

The Poorboy Diner was two miles from the Hollydale business strip and almost always packed for breakfast on the weekends. But on a Friday morning, it was relatively empty. Damon told the host he would be eating alone as he peered through the diner’s silvery 1950s motif searching for Clara. He spotted her toward the rear of the diner. A tall black man at her table had his back to the door and another man sat facing Clara. The host steered Damon toward the breakfast bar, but Damon requested a booth in the back.

He wasn’t sure how Clara would receive him, if at all. But she smiled warmly with recognition while he shed his lightweight summer jacket. He placed it in his booth and approached her nearby table.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said facing Clara. “It must have been a terrible shock for you.”

“Thank you,” she replied softly. “Even though we didn’t get along very well, he was the only family I had left.” Damon noticed Jordan Hall’s eyes well up with empathy.

“Well,” Damon stammered, unable to think of a way to extend the conversation, “enjoy your breakfast.”

“Wait, Damon. Are you alone? Would you like to join us?”

Jordan frowned. The man opposite Clara shifted in his seat.

It was clear from each man’s body language that he wasn’t welcome, but Damon accepted anyway. Damon shook hands with Jordan who was cleanly shaven and wore a light blue t-shirt with a picture of a double helix coupled with the phrase “Unzip my Genes.”

The other man rose and extended a hand toward Damon, who shook it. The man was of medium stature, in his late fifties and had one of the most unattractive haircuts Damon had ever seen. A purplish scalp stood out in front of a graying horseshoe ring, but he had managed to allow the hair at the back grow down to his shoulders. He had light olive skin and thick eyebrows rising above small green eyes. Tiny dimples highlighted his features without managing to provide an appearance of youth.

Clara introduced the man as Toma Ljubic, her mother’s brother and a hard liquor distributor from Baltimore, fifty miles northeast of Hollydale.

Damon lowered himself into the table’s fourth chair. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Damon found himself saying to Toma after speaking the identical words to Clara only a minute earlier.

“My loss?” he replied sternly. “If you mean my asshole brother-in-law Lirim, I’m not sorry. My sister, on the other hand, is another story.” Toma’s eyes softened when he mentioned his sister. Damon noticed that Jordan had reached out and placed a protective hand over Clara’s.

“Both, I guess,” Damon replied. “Jim Riley told me about your sister, Tabby.”

“And you couldn’t have helped but to overhear me and my father the other night at the Fish Barrel,” interjected Clara.

“I did hear a bit,” admitted Damon.

Jordan chimed in, “At least now, Clara, you won’t have any problems getting your fair share from your mother’s estate.”

“True,” said Clara. “And I suppose whatever my father has is mine as well. Though that brute Victor tells me his share of the business was mortgaged beyond belief. I suspect I’ll have to ask Jim Riley to buy me out.”

“I spoke with Jim at the fairgrounds while you were talking to the police,” Jordan said. “I asked him what he thought of buying. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, that’s fine,” countered Clara curtly. “You know as well as I do that I have no interest in Big Surf.”

“What did Jim say?” asked Toma.

“He said that after he paid off all of the loans, he could probably settle on writing Clara a check for a hundred thousand.”

Clara tried in vain to suppress a smile.

“Well, between that and the hundred and fifty thousand you should be getting from Tabby’s estate, you’ll be sitting pretty,” said Toma.

“I suppose,” replied Clara who was unable to hide a look of satisfaction. “Once the police let us leave, I just want to get back to Richmond and forget all about it.”

“And then maybe we can work on getting married,” said Jordan.

Clara shot him a doleful look, but Jordan didn’t appear to notice and began to caress her hand.

“Maybe now I can move on, too,” Toma said. “I just couldn’t get past Tabby’s accident while that man was alive.” Toma inflected an air of disbelief into the word “accident.” He glanced at Damon and quickly changed topic to an indictment of the roadwork crews along the I-95 corridor.

Damon came away from breakfast with two distinct impressions. The first was a confirmation of his earlier suspicion that Dr. Jordan Hall was far more interested in Clara than she was in him. Only Jordan didn’t appear to be privy to her thoughts. The second was that Toma held a grudge against his former brother-in-law.

Damon considered Tabby Jovanovic’s accident. Jim Riley said the police believed it was a hit-and-run. But Toma hinted that perhaps it hadn’t been an accident after all. Could Lirim have been cold enough to cause the accident himself? It seemed far-fetched, but would explain Toma’s attitude toward Lirim and provide Toma a motive to strangle his brother-in-law. Of course, if Lirim ran into his own wife’s car, he risked killing himself as well.

At home, Damon left Gerry Sloman a voicemail. Damon still had a few hours before set-up began for that evening’s Fourth of July party. He decided to try his hand at amateur detective work. He could use his Lexis account at the library to search newspaper databases for records of Tabby’s accident.

The small cedar planked building in Hollydale was a mile and a half from the main county library and served a committed cadre of neighborhood residents. A large open second story regularly played host to local school groups and parent-and-baby reading sessions. But early Friday afternoons were quiet. Damon said a brief hello to Mrs. Stein who was staffing the front desk. He sat in front of one of the three reference computers.

Damon quickly found three hits for Tabitha Jovanovic in Morgantown’s Dominion Post. The first referenced Tabby as a volunteer at a local hospital fundraiser.

The second was an account of her accident and death. The newspaper dated back a year and a half, to December. Tabitha “Tabby” Jovanovic was found deceased in an older model forest green Chevy Cavalier. The airbag had deployed, but local sheriff’s deputy Jasper Horton stated that the brunt of the impact took place on the front driver’s corner and Ms. Jovanovic had not fastened her seat belt, effectively rendering the airbag useless. In his opinion, the collision killed her instantly. Tabby was found at 5:42 a.m. by a local man, Mr. Simon Chenter, driving along a rural wood-lined gravel road on his way to work. Mr. Chenter observed its tail end in the ditch with the car’s nose pointing face forward on the road. The position was consistent with a front end hit-and-run, said Deputy Horton. Black paint was visible on the crushed Cavalier. The police were looking for a black vehicle with significant front end damage. The article was silent on the reason for Tabby’s late-night excursion.

The final Dominion Post newspaper article on Tabby was a follow-up three days later. It provided information on an upcoming funeral, contained a brief quotation citing the deceased woman’s virtues from the “widower, Lirim Jovanovic,” and stated that the police had no leads on the identity of the hit-and-run driver.

Damon printed out the two stories on the accident and hunted through a range of small papers looking for references to Tabby or Lirim. No other stories referenced Tabby, but Damon found an editorial in a small local paper that Lirim had written a year prior to his wife’s death.

It was a sharp-tongued dismissal of an article pertaining to the storage of utility vehicles on personal property. From Lirim’s response, Damon gathered that the original commentary focused on the diminishment of property value and general eyesore caused by homeowners parking commercial vehicles in their yards. Lirim admitted that he was such a homeowner and avowed that he should be entitled to do “whatever the [blank] I want” with the land he owned.

He provided his own story as an example of “the stupidity” of the author’s argument. Lirim unabashedly stated that he owned a carnival business. During the winter months, he parked his trailers and equipment in an empty lot he rented at an abandoned airfield. But those same winter months provided his only opportunity for heavy repairs and maintenance. He had a “well-kept work shed with an oversized garage door” next to his home in Cheat Lake, but the larger vehicles and rides didn’t fit inside. They were housed in his yard while he worked on them.