Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos (24 page)

Nothing like a homicide on the premises to draw in customers. People began swarming in even before we finished the cleanup. Okay, they spent a lot of time staring at the curtain behind which, as everyone had heard, I'd found the body, and starting whenever Michael made the slightest noise. Some even asked me to tell them about what had happened. But after milling around taking up space for a while, enough of them would feel sufficiently guilty to buy something. I began to hope I'd make up for lost time after all.

If I'd had a chance, I'd have tried to dust the fingerprint powder off every surface of the booth before letting people in, but I quickly realized that the lingering signs of the investigation proved more of a selling point than a tidy booth.

"Looks like you're catching up," Amanda said, popping across the lane during one of the few quiet moments we both had.

"Hope so," I said.

"I've been wanting to ask – where did you get that outfit you wore last night?"

"Michael had Mrs. Tranh make it," I said. "Why – do you want one?"

"I think I might look pretty good in a dress like that, with a set of those stays," she said, looking faintly sheepish. "And heck, if I'm going to do any more of these costumed fairs, I think I should get the right outfit."

"To tell you the truth, yesterday I'd have said you were crazy, but today – I feel kind of frumpy in this dress," I said, shaking my head in surprise. "By the way – you live in Richmond, right?"

"All my life," she said. "Even went to college there. Why?"

"Ever heard of a company called Cooper and Anthony?"

"Yeah, heard too much about it," she said. "Why?"

"What is it?"

"What was it, you mean," she said. "Small, family-owned business outside of Richmond. Started out making paper after the Civil War, then expanded into other stuff. Managed to expand themselves out of business about seven years ago."

"I heard they had help going out of business," I said.

"I've heard that, too," she said. "Mostly from men who lost their jobs when the place closed down. I always figured, they were so bitter, maybe it made them feel a little better to blame outsiders for their problems."

"I just talked to someone who lost money investing in Cooper and Anthony, and those bitter men just may be right."

"Damn, does that mean I have to go back home and apologize to Daddy and my uncles for thinking all these years that they were paranoid?"

"Oh, no; please don't tell me it's your family we're talking about."

"Not just my family; must have been six or seven hundred people lost their jobs when the place finally shut down."

"Any of them still bitter enough after all these years to do something about it?"

"We're talking about Benson, aren't we? He had something to do with the shutdown?"

"Engineered it, according to Mrs. Fenniman."

"This'll make Daddy's day, hearing the man responsible for him losing his job has passed over."

"Make mine; tell me you have an alibi for the time of the murder."

"Oh, don't you worry," Amanda said. "I have a real good alibi, and if Monty looks at me the way he was looking at you, my alibi damn well better punch his lights out if he wants to alibi me again tonight. I just hope that bunch of sorry old men up in Richmond were playing their usual Friday night poker game last night, or the cops'll be looking real hard at them. Couple of them caused some trouble already, back when the plant shut down."

"That's too bad," I said.

"Keep an eye on my booth, will you?" she said. "I think I'll wander over and tell Deputy Monty all about Cooper and Anthony."

"No problem," I said. "I'm sure Monty will be thrilled to know all about his six or seven hundred new suspects."

Of course, Monty might decide that the demise of Cooper and Anthony was too long ago to be relevant, but just imagining those hundreds of people up in Richmond, only an hour's drive away, lusting for Benson's blood, made me feel a little less anxious about our local suspects.

"That's not accurate," someone said behind me.

I turned to see a woman wearing a Town Watch badge frowning down at the table where I kept the small iron goods.

"I said, that's not accurate," she repeated, taking a sheet of paper out of her haversack. "They didn't have nails in colonial times."

"Actually, they did," I said, picking up one of the nails on display. "They looked different from our modern nails, of course, since they were made by hand. The shaft was usually square, and the head was either square or pyramid shaped because – "

"Nonsense," she said. She had taken out a quill pen and a bottle of ink – ready to write me up a summons for anachronisms. "They didn't have nails at all; they just used wooden pegs to hold things together."

"Well, maybe you should tell that to the blacksmiths up in Colonial Williamsburg," I said, with growing irritation. "I spent quite some time up there, learning about eighteenth-century hardware, and I can tell you – "

"They're wrong," she insisted. "Wooden pegs. That's all they ever used. Wooden pegs."

"Look, lady," I said, losing my temper completely. "They had nails long before 1781. How do you think they put shoes on horses – with Scotch tape?"

Her mouth fell open as she pondered this. Then she recovered.

"Well, I never!" she exclaimed, storming out. "Just for that, I'm going to double your fine!"

As I was counting to ten, I heard someone slowly clapping. I turned to see Jess, the artillery captain.

"Good job," he said. "She doesn't believe you, of course. You should have reminded her they had nails at Calvary."

"I should have kept my temper," I said.

He shrugged.

"Who cares," he said. "Bunch of morons, the Town Watch. Not a one of them knows a rifle from a musket."

"I'm not sure I know, either."

"Yeah, but you're not running around telling people their expensive, well-researched, reproduction frontier rifles are anachronisms, are you?"

I groaned.

"I'll speak to them," I said.

"Thanks," he said. "They've been all over us, ever since Madame Von Steuben found out about the loudspeaker trick. And after the fiasco last night with their losing the key to the stocks, they're all trying to get out of the doghouse by putting us in it. Say, you know that cousin of yours?"

"Which one?" I asked. "I have about a million of them around here."

"The reporter guy, the one who got locked up. He wants to interview some of our people. Is he trustworthy?"

"Not in the slightest," I said. "He'd sell his grandmother to get a scoop."

"We'll be careful what we say, then."

"You don't have to talk to him at all, you know," I said.

"Well, I feel kind of sorry for him," Jess said. "All the other reporters who weren't even here all day got their stories, and he didn't get out of the stocks in time to make his deadline."

"He should be thankful. If he hadn't been locked up, maybe he'd have been in the stories," I said. "As a prime suspect, or maybe even the victim."

"Yeah, this way he's one of the few people in town who's in the clear," Jess said, turning to leave. "Him and the guy who passed out after locking him up."

As Jess strolled away, I suddenly wondered if Tony's drunkenness was such a good alibi. He'd been lying where Wesley couldn't see him, after all. He could have locked Wesley up, gone down to my booth to kill Benson, and then come back to lie down where I'd found him. For all I knew, he could have been awake when I stumbled on him.

Tony as murderer, I liked the idea.

I'd have to talk to Wesley – find out exactly what he remembered and see if my theory held water. And if it did, I'd make Monty listen if I had to knock him down and sit on him.

I ducked behind the curtain to tell Michael and found him laughing at something on the laptop screen.

"Okay," I said. "What's so funny?"

"Well, not the first CD; that's just the latest copy of Rob's game," he said, holding up one of the white paper envelopes, which he'd labeled
lawyers from hell.
"Not of general interest."

"Well, not to us, anyway," I said. "Although for Rob's sake, I hope it's a runaway success."

"As long as I never have to play it again," he said. I knew how he felt. Rob had drafted me as a beta tester so often I'd begun dreaming about the game, and I'd picked up so much miscellaneous trivia about torts and writs and habeas corpus that I could probably do a pretty believable impersonation of an attorney if I had to.

"What about the other disks?"

"Well, I suspect the one I've got in the machine now is Wesley Hatcher's disk," he said.

"The one with the incriminating evidence about the sheriff?"

"Exactly. Incriminating photos, to be exact."

"How bad is it?"

"Take a look," he said, starting to turn the laptop so I could see the screen.

"Michael," I said, backing away slightly, "I do not want to look at a bunch of dirty pictures, especially not of someone I know. Someone I'm related to, if you come right down to it. And besides –
"

"Don't worry," he said. "Just look."

I glanced down at the screen. There was the sheriff, all right. And he was with a woman. They were seated, one on either side of a white, Formica-topped table, in front of a window. Outside the window you could see the storefronts of a shopping center, including a Farm Fresh supermarket.

"They're in a fast-food restaurant," I said.

"A McDonald's, I think, from the color scheme."

"You're right," I said. "In fact, I think I know exactly which McDonald's – it's on Route 17, in Gloucester, about four or five miles north of Yorktown. I recognize the shopping center behind them."

"You're probably right," he said.

"Is that it? Him sitting with a woman in Mickey D's?"

"Well, not just sitting with her," Michael said. "Here he is shaking her hand when she arrives at the table… opening up his box of Chicken McNuggets… opening the mustard sauce. And look – he's offering her some fries."

"And she's taking one," I said, shaking my head. "Heavy stuff here."

"Hey, maybe mat's it," Michael said. "Maybe it's the fast food that's incriminating. Did he make a campaign promise to go on a diet and shape up?"

"Not that I've heard," I said. "Why would he? I can't imagine anyone would care. And who is she, anyway? She looks vaguely familiar."

"Not someone you know, then?"

I peered close, and had Michael run through the whole picture sequence again.

"Like I said, she looks vaguely familiar, but mat could just be because I've been staring suspiciously at her face for fifteen minutes now," I said, finally. "Unless – Michael, she could be the same woman we saw talking to Benson last night. The one driving the Jaguar."

"That's what I thought," he said. "I wasn't sure, though."

"Go back a couple – there. The profile. It's definitely her; I got a good look at her profile when she drove past. It has to be her."

"Of course, since we have no idea who she is, I'm not sure that helps much."

"Do you think you could figure out how to crop one of those so it shows just her? I've got my little printer in the van; we could print out a copy of it."

"Great idea; then we could show it around, and find out if anyone knows her. Although that's going to take an awful lot of time," he said. "And I suppose we ought to give this to Monty, come to think of it."

"Don't worry about showing it around," I said. "We'll show it to Mother; if she doesn't know who it is, the odds are no one else in town will, either, and if she does, we can give it to Monty along with the information about who she is."

"Good point," Michael said. "I'll see what I can do about the cropping. One other thing – what do you make of this?"

He opened up a file. A letter, from Wesley to the Canton, Ohio, Police Department, inquiring about one Ranulf Brakenridge Montgomery.

"He's suspicious of Monty," I said. "Do you think this has anything to do with the blond McHussy?"