Murder by Numbers (6 page)

In fact, the whole Schilling family was outside working on repairs. Nora Schilling struggled to hold a sheet of plywood in place while Gary knelt with a hammer and nails.

Liza crossed over. “Let me give you a hand with that,” she offered.

“It's not heavy.” Nora nodded toward the two pieces of scrap lumber bearing the weight of the plywood. “Just cumbersome.”

Liza left an indignant Rusty tied to a parking meter and braced the other side of the plywood sheet. “The same thing happened to me a few months ago, and Curt Walters boarded up my kitchen door.”

“That's right—you had a window smashed in that break-in.” Nora sighed as she looked at her display window. “I'm afraid this will take a bigger pane.” She managed a smile. “And it will be a big pain in the wallet, too.”

“I suppose that's true,” Liza said. “Do you have insurance?”

“Yes, but I have to talk things over with Ray Massini. We all probably should. A mass of incidents like this can have consequences. If the company will want higher premiums, it might be better not to report this and pay for repairs myself.” She shook her head. “In that case, there goes the money from the movie people. I was planning on using it to upgrade the cash registers, but this is more important.”

“That's a shame.”

“We've all been struggling, even with the movie people in town. It's tough to keep a small business going these days. Too much competition from big box stores way out by the highway.” Nora sighed. “The location money would have given us all a bit of a cushion. Things have changed so much in this business. I was going through some old records, from the eighties. Back then, you'd have prescriptions for five dollars, or even two bucks. Nowadays, you're lucky to see a ten-dollar prescription. More likely, it's fifty, or a hundred and something. Our poor customers are having to choose between medicine and food. Food keeps winning, I figure.”

She held tight to the plywood as Gary began hammering. “We saw the same thing when my husband got sick. The doctors prescribed something for the nausea from his chemotherapy, but they had no idea what it was going to cost us. The retail price was something like forty dollars a pill! Matt used to joke, saying that was the active ingredient—money! He said he'd be damned if he'd throw up something as expensive as that.”

Gary brought out a ladder and began work on the top end of the plywood sheet.

“People think we're getting rich selling them drugs just because paying for 'em is making them poor. But there's really not that much difference between the price we pay for drugs and what we charge our customers for the prescriptions. People think all that money they're forking over is sticking to our fingers, but we've got to cut our markup to the bone to compete. Otherwise, people go to the chains or do their business over in Killamook.”

Or they order online or go to Canada
, Liza thought. But she figured saying it out loud would only make Nora more unhappy.

Gary finished his banging. “I think that will hold,” he said.

Nora and Liza stepped away, and the wood didn't fall down. “Looks solid. That's about the best we can hope for,” Nora said. “Holding on.”

Liza retrieved Rusty from his hitching post and headed home, thinking about the sudden crime wave in Maiden's Bay. Graffiti, broken windows, a body on the beach…Ollie the Chiseler was dead, but she found she couldn't scrape up much emotion over that. On the other hand, she had all the sympathy in the world for the other victims, the people on Main Street, cleaning up and holding on.

Liza headed for home up Main Street with Rusty eagerly in the lead. The dog shot her some disappointed looks as they zigzagged along the street, trying to skirt the crowds taking in the vandalism repairs. From Rusty's point of view, Liza was cheating him out of some interesting smells.

They set off across Main again, avoiding one of the larger knots of onlookers.
At least I'm not risking our lives
, Liza thought.
There are no big film equipment trucks on the road, not with all the filming suspended for police questioning.

Then she saw a familiar SUV pulling up ahead of her. Kevin Shepard's big black behemoth was hard to miss. Liza often teased him that it looked like a cross between a tank and an aircraft carrier.

“What are you going to do with that thing when gas prices go up again?” she called as he leaned out the window to wave.

“I was thinking of raising a mast and adding some sails.”

Now across the street, Liza poked her head in the passenger side window. “You could find something a little less expensive to run.”

“Sure. Heck, I could kayak across the bay from Killamook.” Kevin's bantering tone got a bit darker. “Although God knows what I'd have seen if I tried that today. Stumbling over bodies is getting to be a bad habit with you.”

Liza shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“Are you going to put yourself in the middle of this one, too? From what I hear, this Chissel guy deserved everything he got.”

“Look, I didn't ask to find Oliver Chissel, any more than I asked to find poor Derrick. I can't say I'm crying any tears over Ollie the Chiseler, either. But we've got friends involved, and they're questioning me as well. And I'm not the only one they're talking to. The cops are already looking at Michelle and Michael—”

Kevin looked less than broken up about that.

“They'll be after Jenny, too—not to mention some of your guests, like Guy Morton and Lloyd Olbrich.”

“That's how I found out about all of this,” Kevin said sourly. “Curt Walters called me at the office, trying to see if we could help him pin down everyone's comings and goings.”

“You don't sound too enthusiastic about that.”

His look got more sour. “I'm not. At the inn, we expect our guests to exercise discretion—and they expect the same from us.”

Liza tilted her head a little. “Meaning?”

“We try not to pry—unless we see a guest bringing in something like a goat, or the makings of a bonfire—”

“Or hookers from one of the less select resort towns?” Liza suggested.

“That's not funny, Liza. There's a lot of stuff they don't discuss in classes about hospitality management. Like suicides.”

Liza blinked. “What?”

“Not everybody decides to take a swan dive off a cliff,” Kevin said grimly. “Some decide to pop off in a nice place. They check in, have a good dinner, go upstairs, and off themselves. It's not so nice for the housekeeping staff. And it doesn't help the reputation of the inn if guests see the old guy in room twenty-three coming out in a body bag.”

“This was hardly a suicide. And it didn't happen at your hotel. Besides, I figure if you know where your guests are and can keep them off the sheriff's list, it would be a big plus for the inn. You can't give anybody an alibi?” Liza pressed, thinking of Jenny.

“The best tools Sheriff Clements has to pin down the time of the crime are the local tide tables,” Kevin replied. “And that can't tell him when Chissel got planted. The whole thing happened at night, probably late at night. We can't vouch for anybody—certainly not for the entire night.”

Liza watched Kevin closely, teased by a hint of something worrisome in the back of his voice. The last time she'd heard that tone was in high school, when he'd broken a date supposedly for a special team practice. Kevin had just neglected to tell her what they were practicing for—maybe frat parties? It had turned out to be a night out with the boys.

“If you can't alibi anybody, don't you have someone you'd like to nominate for Pest Exterminator of the Year?”

That flash of discomfort grew a little stronger in Kevin's eyes. “Did you ever watch that old show with Guy Morton?”

“
Masked Justice
?” Liza nodded. “Sure. I missed the full run when I was a kid, but I saw it again on Nick at Nite.”

“Have you seen
all
of them?” Kevin leaned across the center console toward the window where Liza peeked in.

“Well, I'm working two jobs, and that time of night is usually when I really get going with sudoku. So I've probably missed my share of the episodes. Why?”

“I'm guessing you missed the one where that Masked Justice guy catches a member of this kidnapping gang. He needs to find out where the crooks are holding this kid, but his guy won't talk. So the masked man takes the baddie out to the beach and plants him up to his neck—with the tide coming in. The guy holds out until the water is actually sloshing in his mouth, but he finally talks. Masked Justice digs the guy out and goes off to the rescue.”

“Are you saying you think Guy did this?” Liza asked.

Kevin shrugged uncomfortably. “Hey, I like Guy Morton. But everybody knows he hated Oliver Chissel.”

“Yeah. Especially after he mentioned it several times on
Evening Celebrity News
,” Liza said.

“I'm not saying I know anything for certain. But what if Morton decided to take a page from that old script—and changed the end?”

Liza had nothing to say to that. She looked away. Kevin followed her gaze to the window of Ma's Café, where the short-order cook was working with tape and cardboard to cover a hole in the plate glass, under the watchful eyes of the owner, Liz Sanders.

The original Ma, Ma Burke, had decided to retire in the wake of the Robbins murder/kidnapping. But she'd left the café in the capable hands of her younger sister. Liz turned out to be a younger, smaller version of Ma, definitely just as feisty. And she could cook better.

A definite win for the little town.

“Dunno why the hell they couldn't have put a hole in the window of that latte palace down the street,” she growled. “If I catch the peckerwood who did this…”

Liza glanced up at Kevin. “Have you ever had trouble with people trying to mess up your place? I mean, a lot of this area is still pretty blue collar. I figure a fancy-schmantzy inn would be a fairly ripe target for the more, uh, unreconstructed locals.”

“Or is that yokels?” Kevin laughed. “Sure, I had one teenager trying out the old ‘boys will be jackasses' thing. He pulled a drive-by in our parking area with a paintball gun.”

“What did you do?”

“I invested in one of those gadgets for myself, and waited till the little turd showed up again. I covered his windshield, gave his pickup a new color scheme, and unloaded the rest of my magazine on the kid's butt.” His grin had a little bit of the wolf in it. “The velocity of a paintball is about a tenth of a rifle slug, but it still stings when it hits.”

Liza shook her head. “Typical. You sound like all those Chuck Norris jokes I keep hearing.”

Kevin laughed. “You mean, ‘Before the boogeyman goes to sleep, he checks that Chuck Norris isn't under the bed'?”

“Nope, the one I was thinking about was, ‘Chuck Norris doesn't sleep—he waits.' That sounds like you, lying in bed with a paintball gun, staying up for this jackass.”

“I prefer to think of it in terms of Chuck's best movie quote.” Kevin deepened his voice. “‘You just messed with the wrong guy.'”

Is that what happened with Chissel?
Liza wondered.
Did he mess with the wrong guy?

“What do you think about Deke Jannsky?” The words were out of her mouth before she really thought about them.

“For what? Messing up Main Street or doing in Oliver Chissel?”

“Either.” Liza leaned farther through the window. “Both.”

Kevin hesitated for a long moment before he replied, looking sharply at Liza to make sure she was serious. Finally, he shrugged. “Deke is certainly a major lowlife around town. A lot worse than…some people I could name.”

Liza nodded sadly, thinking of the ne'er-do-well friend they'd lost the last time major crime had touched Maiden's Bay.

“That said—I dunno. Deke would have to have a pretty big mad on to start wrecking the shopping district. After all, he lives here, too.”

“The last time I saw him, he was pretty mad,” Liza said. “He got fired from his job as an extra on the film because he wouldn't follow the rules.”

She paused for a second, frowning. “In fact, he was acting as if he'd put in a lot of work, and that doesn't happen with extras. Most of the time, they're just sitting around, waiting while the shot is set up.”

Her frown got deeper. “Suppose he
had
been working, screwing things up on the set so filming would be delayed and he'd get extra hours?”

“Now that would sound like Deke,” Kevin said. “Has there been a lot of sabotage?”

“Chissel made it sound like there was,” Liza replied. “All I saw was some impolite graffiti painted on a shed asking the film company, though not in so many words, to leave.”

“What color was it?”

She gave him a look. “Glitter pink.”

“Too bad,” Kevin said. “Not exactly Deke's style. Now, if it had been blue—” He broke off when he saw the look on Liza's face. “I guess you weren't around the time Deke decided to redo his kitchen table and chairs on the cheap and easy. He brought them outside, opened a can of spray paint, and began spritzing away.”

Kevin laughed. “Maybe he was hungover, or maybe he was just being Deke. Anyway, he didn't notice that there was a pretty stiff breeze blowing, and very little of the paint was getting on the furniture. By the time he finally got done, he'd barely touched his furniture, but he'd turned most of his lawn a beautiful shade of blue, except for the silhouette of a cheap dinette set in the middle. That lasted a few weeks last summer, and it almost became a tourist attraction.”

In spite of her efforts to be serious, Liza found herself chuckling at the mental image. “I guess that story doesn't exactly enhance Deke's stature as a criminal genius. If he'd done the stuff I saw, the graffiti probably would have been blue—I can't see him hoarding pink glitter spray paint.”

“Maybe he used that color to throw everybody off the scent,” Kevin said.

“Deke? You think he'd plan that far ahead?”

“Oh, Deke does have a bit of animal cunning that helps him through most of his scams,” Kevin said. “But he has a nearly terminal case of laziness. In fact, it's the main reason I can't see him running down the street smashing windows.”

“But what if he did do it—and Oliver Chissel saw him, the big boss of the company that just fired him—?”

“You're really piling it on, aren't you?” Kevin interrupted. “Sabotage, vandalism, and now murder—there's a theory that ties up everything in a nice, neat package. Problem is, real life is usually a lot messier than theory.”

Liza shrugged and nodded. “Sheriff Clements said pretty much the same thing. But imagine if it happened the way I said…”

“Remember, we're talking about Deke Jannsky here,” Kevin said. “If they'd found Chissel dumped in an alley with a tire iron stuck in his head, that would seem more like Deke's style. Hell, they'd probably find Deke's fingerprints on the tire iron.”

He shook his head. “But we're talking about considerable thought and effort involved here. I mean, who'd think of using the ocean as a murder weapon? Besides, just figuring out the tides would take more planning than Deke usually puts into his scams.”

“Not so much thought,” Liza objected. “You just told me, the basic idea for the body on the beach appeared on TV not too long ago.”

“Yeah.” Kevin dragged out the word, dripping in doubt. “And the magic of TV is that it certainly wouldn't show how much of a job it would really be—hauling the body from Main Street down to the beach, digging a pit in the sand, getting Chissel arranged properly without him trying to fight his way out of there—I'm still wondering how our killer managed that stunt. Besides, digging's more work than Deke would ever do, much less packing the sand back in—”

“The pile driver was right there. Maybe Deke used that to plant Chissel.”

Kevin didn't even bother to hide the look of superiority on his face. “For a would-be detective, you've got a lot to learn. You can't get a body—dead or unconscious—to stand up at attention like a wooden piling. And if the killer buried Chissel up to his neck in sand, he had to manage that. It'd be a tough trick, whether Chissel was dead or alive at the time.” He shook his head, trying to make the image go away. “I'm hoping, for his sake, he was dead.”