Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (18 page)

Chapter
23

The details of the journal, plus
the cassette from the telephone answering machine were burning holes in my
pockets. I felt like I had vital clues here, I just didn’t yet know what they
were or how they all fit together. I got two blocks away and then pulled out
the tape. It was of the micro variety and I wasn’t sure what type of machine
would be required to play it—but I knew I didn’t have one.

Somewhere in this shopping
district I’d seen an electronics store. I wandered nearly eight blocks before I
spotted it. A guy who could barely be out of high school sat behind the
counter, ear buds plugged in, swaying to a beat that I could hear through his
skull. I gave a wide wave of my arms to get his attention.

I showed him the cassette and he
looked at it as if it were from another planet. “It’s from an answering
machine,” I said.

“Wow—I thought those were all
digital.”

“In the olden days,” I said with
a grin, “they used these.” I didn’t tell him that I’d come across one in my
parents’ attic that used small reel-to-reel tapes. That admission would place
me in the age of dinosaurs, for sure.

“What I need to know is whether
you have any kind of machine that can play this?”

He turned it over in his hands.
“Yeah, got it.”

I followed him to a display shelf
of small tape recorders. Lo and behold, there was actually one, a rather dusty
unit. I would buy it if I had to but really, just to listen to what would
amount to a very few minutes of messages that probably wouldn’t mean anything
to me anyway.

“Could I demo this?” I asked.

“Oh, sure.” He opened the back of
it to be sure the recorder had batteries in it, placed some there, and inserted
the small tape. He handed it to me and stood there.

“Privately?”

“Oh, right.” He moved over to the
sales counter and plugged the earbuds back into his head.

I rewound the tape a short way
and hit Play. A man’s voice, unfamiliar to me. “. . . another few weeks. These things
take time.”

Not enough info. I rewound the
tape again and it began to play in the middle of a message from someone telling
Dolly that the book she’d ordered had come in. I let the tape continue to play.
That same male voice came on. “Archie, Nigel Trahorn here. Sorry I don’t have
the answer you want, about the funds, it will be another few weeks. These
things take time.”

Nigel Trahorn. I knew that name .
. . It took a few seconds to click before I remembered that he was the attorney
in the photos at the news office. The man whose family once owned Dolly’s
building. He’d been photographed talking to Archie at a social function. And
now he was calling Archie about some money.

The tape was blank after that.
There was no date or time recorded with the message, so I had no way of knowing
how recently Trahorn called. I rewound the tape once more. Three messages back,
a woman offered condolences on Dolly’s death and expressed regrets that she’d
not made it to the funeral. That had to have come in after Monday. So all the
messages after that were very recent.

So, what money would Archie be
discussing with an attorney? An insurance policy, an inheritance, or tax issues
were the first things that popped into my mind.

I glanced toward the young clerk
who had his back to me, bobbing to his own beat while he ran a dust cloth over
merchandise that hung on the wall behind the counter. He may not have even
remembered I was in the shop. I might as well learn all I could.

I rewound the micro tape to the
beginning and played all the messages this time. They came from the days
immediately after Dolly died, which made sense when I thought about it. In her
efficient way, she’d probably cleared the tape every time she retrieved
messages. Archie merely let them accumulate.

The entire collection consisted
of a total of four condolence calls—all from women—then the one about Dolly’s
bookshop order and the one from the attorney. Clearly, I’d exhausted any
possible useful information I would get from it. I ejected the tape, pocketed
it, then set the recorder back on the shelf. The clerk gave me a rhythmic nod
to the beat of his own music when I stepped over to the door and mouthed a
thank-you to him.

Money changes a lot of things,
and the realization that Archie was waiting to come into something could be a
game-changer. Catherine already had money. I couldn’t see that Archie’s money
would make much difference to her. Although his financial status might. If he
could afford to move back to the nicer neighborhood, fit in again with her
social set . . . well, that might make it more feasible for the two of them to
really become a couple.

On the other hand, why? If they’d
continued their affair through the years when Archie lost his job and lived in
the apartment above his wife’s knitting shop, Catherine couldn’t be all that
hung up on his finances. I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around all the nuances,
but then it could just be that I’d skipped breakfast and it was well past lunch
time and I needed fuel.

Knowing this would be my last lunch
in Bury, I couldn’t resist—it was back to the Cornish pasty shop for another of
those special treats. I carried the hot little pastry pocket of savory meat
with me, picking at bits of the crust while I strolled the streets, mulling
over the mountain of little facts I’d gathered about Dolly, Archie, her death
and his secret life. Although the details were numerous, I couldn’t for the
life of me piece together a murder out of it.

In this day and age, people
didn’t risk a lifelong prison term because they were unhappy with their
spouses. Well, okay, some did. But Archie didn’t fit the mold. I got it that he
had a hard time standing up to Dolly. Her own diary entries made it pretty
clear that she was a heck of a determined woman. But the man had two legs—wouldn’t
he have simply walked out the door if he were ready to end the marriage?

Again, I came back to the money.
Depending on what type of ‘funds’ Nigel Trahorn had been talking about, and how
much it involved, that could very well be the piece of the puzzle that would
make everything fall into place.

I wondered how I would find out.
Dolly might have had a large life insurance policy, or perhaps there was money
in her name that Archie couldn’t access unless she died. But even if I had the
name of the insurance company or the registration information for a bank
account, what were the odds I could bluff my way in and learn the details?

I realized that my little meal
had vanished and I was standing near one of the hanging flower baskets at the
east end of Lilac Lane. Bluffing is something I do pretty well, so before I
could talk myself out of it I strode over to the storefront where a man was in
the process of taking down The Knit and Purl’s hanging sign.

I sidestepped him and went
inside.

“How’s it going?” I asked Archie,
knowing at a glance that he was in a muddle again.

He was alone in the shop,
although I could hear voices of the movers down in the cellar. Archie’s hands
fluttered above a file box which he’d begun to fill with folders from the
drawers of the work area.

“I sent Gabrielle out for some
lunch and she’s not returned yet,” he said.

The phone rang just then,
apparently someone who was coming to pick up the store fixtures and wanted to
know if this was a convenient time. Archie said it would be best to allow
another hour.

“They’ll be wanting this counter
and the desk,” he mumbled.

“Could you use some help? I’m
pretty good with paperwork,” I said with a nod toward the box.

“I could gather those up, file
them neatly. You can always go through them later on, once you get settled.”

He lost a little of the
deer-in-the-headlights look.

“Here,” I told him. “you pack the
small items into this box. I’ll get the files organized into this other one.”

I handed him a mid-sized cube of
a carton and gestured toward the clutter of little office items—stapler, tape
dispenser and such.

“It doesn’t much matter if
they’re neatly stowed,” I said. “Just fill the box and get one of the movers to
take it away.”

He followed directions well, and
I guessed it was from years of practice. Once a woman entered the room Archie
Jones just let her take over. A little weird, I thought, but in this case I
planned to use it to my advantage.

I pulled the banker’s box up
beside the two file drawers and took a seat in the chair beside them. Even
though I pretended to work quickly, I managed to get a look at each of the
descriptive tabs. Everything looked pretty standard for any small business.
There were folders for Paid Invoices, Accounting, Customer Contacts and a
series labeled with business names that appeared to be the suppliers of various
inventory items. I came across one titled Insurance, which I discreetly slipped
under the box.

Archie filled the carton I’d
handed him and muttering something about needing another one, went off to the
stockroom.

I slipped out the insurance
folder and opened it, keeping one eye toward the doorway where Archie had gone.
Unfortunately, the policy inside was to insure the contents of the shop, not
Dolly’s life. I filed it and continued.

When Archie didn’t immediately
appear I took a peek inside another folder labeled Bank Account. It too, was
strictly business. The neatly folded statements were all in the name of the
shop and the balance on the most recent one showed only about a hundred pounds
in the account. Nothing else in either of the two drawers appeared to pertain
to funds or money that might reasonably be the subject of the conversation with
Archie’s attorney.

I quickly jammed the rest of the
folders into boxes and placed them against the far wall, well out of the way.
When Archie came back I was standing there with a spare banker’s box in my
hand.

“What about upstairs?” I asked.
“I could box up any files you’ve got up there.”

His attention was drawn to a man
in work uniform who’d appeared in the doorway.

“We’re to disconnect the
telephone,” the man said.

Archie, clearly no multi-tasker,
set down the carton he’d brought for the final office supplies and showed the
man where the phone line came in.

I pointed toward the ceiling, a
questioning look on my face and he waved me toward the stairs. That was pretty
easy. I didn’t wait for further instructions.

With permission to enter the
apartment and carte blanche on any files I might find up there I scoped out the
place. The living room was pretty well filled to capacity with a sofa, two fat
armchairs, a TV set and stand, and a coffee table that was way too large for
the confined space. Clearly, all their furnishings had been purchased for
larger quarters. I didn’t remember anything in the kitchen or bath that could
remotely contain what I was looking for, and the only other choice was the
bedroom.

I’d not paid a lot of attention
on my previous visit but now I noticed two good-sized boxes on a top closet
shelf. I pulled them down. One was filled to capacity with photographs and
personal letters, the family memorabilia that collects in the twenty-plus years
that Archie and Dolly must have been together. I ran my hands through the
packets of prints without opening them. The envelopes appeared to contain greeting
cards, with a few personal letters tossed in. All were handwritten, many on
pastel stationery. I turned to the other box.

This was more like it. There were
folders with income tax information. The forms were unfamiliar to me but the
general gist of declaring one’s income to the government and paying a portion
of it remains the same just about everywhere, I suppose. The only remarkable
thing was that the amount of income on the most recent form, after Archie’s
forced retirement, was dramatically less. I could see how the couple might have
struggled with the change in lifestyle and finances.

Another folder contained two
insurance policies. I glanced at the door to be sure no one had sneaked up on
me before opening them. The policy on Archie’s life had a payout that equaled
about three years of his former income. The one on Dolly was for much less,
only about ten thousand pounds. It certainly wouldn’t make Archie wealthy
enough to risk a prison sentence in return.

At the very bottom of the stack,
was a large brown envelope. I pulled it out. The printed return address showed
that it came from a law firm in London. It had been mailed to Dolly Hempsted
Jones. Another quick peek toward the door while I bent the metal brad upward to
open it. A document of about twenty pages came out, accompanied by a
single-sheet letter on law firm stationery.

Dear Mrs. Jones,

Pursuant to our telephone
conversation on this date, enclosed please find your father’s trust documents.
As per the provisions of the trust, the entirety of Brian Hempsted’s estate is
hereby placed into an investment account with the firm of Rodgers, Salen and
Flagg. Further in accordance with your father’s wishes, your inheritance
consists of the income generated by said estate, payable to you in an annual sum,
for the first five years following his death. Upon the fifth anniversary of his
demise, the entire estate passes to you.

Of course it was your father’s
wish that you leave the bulk of the inheritance invested and adjust your
lifestyle to living off the income alone. That, however, is your choice five
years from now.

It was signed by the partner
named Flagg. I looked at the date on the letterhead. Dolly would have come into
her full inheritance three months from now. A chance comment came back to
me—she’d told Archie she had the money for something. I didn’t know what they
were talking about at the time. A brokerage statement included in the packet
showed an account balance of well over two million pounds.