Some Like It Hawk (5 page)

“The what?”

I winced.

“The Flying Monkeys,” I repeated. “It’s what we call the new security service. Someone started calling them stormtroopers, but then we all decided that was a little fraught and melodramatic, so we settled on Flying Monkeys. It’s the uniforms.”

“I see.” His mouth was twitching.

Muriel appeared, coffeepot in hand, and refilled his cup.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat to her.

Muriel was torn between responding to his courtesy and maintaining her righteous indignation. She settled for a curt nod.

“I have to admit, this has been a humbling experience,” he said, as he added sugar to his new coffee.

“Normally by now you’d have cracked the case?”

“Not necessarily.” He took a swallow of the coffee and sighed with contentment. “What I mean—you see, it’s standard operating procedure for PIs to vet our clients before taking on a job. Make sure we’re not going to be aiding and abetting something illegal or unethical. This one seemed like a no-brainer—potential client has a squatter on their property and wants to figure out how to cut off his supplies so he’ll give up and come out. They showed me the legal documents. Seemed on the up and up. But the more I hang around this town…”

He let his voice trail off, clearly trying to draw me out.

My chili arrived.

“Things aren’t always the way they seem at first glance.” I picked up my spoon and dug into the chili.

“No, they’re not,” he said. “And I’m beginning to think maybe this time I’m not playing on the side of the angels.”

“Good insight,” I said over my shoulder as I applied myself to my chili.

A business card slid next to my bowl: Stanley Denton, private investigator; a P.O. box in Staunton, Virginia, and a phone number with a 540 area code.

“If you think of anything that might persuade me I should quit this assignment and go home, I’d be happy to listen,” he said. “Have a good day.”

I glanced up to see that he was tossing a few bills on the counter as he swallowed the last of his coffee.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he called to Muriel.

I heard several sighs of relief as the door closed behind him.

“Overtipped me as usual,” Muriel growled.

“Silly me,” I said. “I thought it was undertipping that you wanted made a capital offense.”

“Thinks he can buy me with a few lousy dollars,” Muriel muttered as she cleaned off the place where Denton had been sitting. She shoved his dirty dishes through the hatch to the kitchen as if she’d rather toss them in the Dumpster, and scrubbed the entire vacant stretch of counter as if trying to eradicate all traces of some dire contagion.

“What did he want?” Sammy Wendell, one of our local deputies, sat down to my right.

“Just wants to cause trouble, that’s what he wants,” said a local farmer as he and his wife sat down to my left in the remaining empty seats at the counter.

In about two minutes, the entire population of the diner had convened an impromptu town meeting to discuss the PI. From the sound of it, he hadn’t made too many friends during the several weeks he’d been in Caerphilly.

I ate my chili in silence, pondering our brief conversation. Was he just trying to gain my confidence? Or was he really starting to have reservations about working for the Evil Lender? And if so, what did he know that we needed to know? Because as much as I disliked the Evil Lender, I hadn’t thought they were doing anything actually illegal. If they were—

He had said illegal or unethical. Unethical wouldn’t help us. And for all I knew he could have just been trying to run some kind of scam on me.

I was still pondering that as I left the diner and headed back toward the town square.

I had plenty of time before my next blacksmithing demonstration. I called up Michael and learned that the boys were enjoying the hay ride. I reminded him to take some pictures for the grandparents. Then I decided to check out what was going on in the world before heading back to the tent. After all, chances were when I got back to the tent, I’d find that Rob had still not made his escape, and I wanted to postpone as long as possible the moment when I gave in to the temptation to chew him out. Especially since I’d probably have to do it by texting, which was not nearly as satisfactory as a phone call.

The food concession area was teeming with happy tourists. The teenager behind the counter at Hamish’s Hamburgers had wisely scorned his own cooking and was openly scarfing up a huge plate of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. The calypso band members were taking their bows, and the Caerphilly Country Cloggers were waiting to take their place.

“Hey, Meg. Got a minute?”

Chapter 5

I’d long ago learned that “got a minute” usually meant that someone was planning to take up a few hours of my time. But when I turned to see who had designs on my afternoon, I saw Randall Shiffley standing in front of one of the larger tents—the one with a neat O
FFICE OF THE
M
AYOR
sign in front.

“Good morning, Mayor Shiffley,” I said.

Randall preened a little, as he usually did when we called him that. I didn’t begrudge him his pride. He was the first elected mayor of Caerphilly in over a century who wasn’t either a Pruitt or a Pruitt puppet.

“Want to come along with me to the courthouse?” he asked. “I’m going over to reason with Mr. Throckmorton. Implore him to come out. I could use a concerned citizen or two in my delegation.”

From the way he worded it, I deduced the presence of the reporters before I spotted them.

“Glad to help,” I said.

“Meg Langslow is a blacksmith—one of the craftspeople participating in Caerphilly Days,” he said to a thin, pretty, but earnest young woman standing beside him. The woman glanced at me and scribbled something in her notebook. “Meg’s husband, Professor Waterston, is in the drama department over at the college.”

A short, stocky man standing nearby lifted the camera that was slung around his neck, studied me through its lens for a few moments, then let it fall to his chest again, as if I wasn’t worth bothering with.

“Ms. Blake is with the
Star-Tribune
,” Randall said.

“The
Washington Star-Tribune
,” Ms. Blake added, with a slight frown, as if she felt it important to avert the grave danger of my thinking she’d come from some other, lesser known
Star-Tribune
. “Call me Kate.”

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Randall said. He strode off toward the courthouse. Kate scampered after him. The photographer and I followed at our own speeds and ended up falling in shoulder to shoulder.

“Do you think you’ll finally be able to convince Mr. Throckmorton to come out?” Kate asked, when she caught up with Randall.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Randall said. “Hasn’t worked the last fifty or sixty times I tried it.”

“So this is just for show, then?” she asked.

“Not a bit,” Randall said, without missing a beat. He didn’t sound the least bit winded, even though we were climbing the tall marble stairs that stretched the full width of the courthouse façade. I thought it was rather courteous of him not to bolt up them two at a time in his usual fashion. They didn’t bother me, but Kate-from-the-
Star-Trib
was panting a little, and the photographer had stopped after ten or twelve steps to wheeze and clutch his side.

“I’d be falling down on the job if I didn’t do everything I could to fix this whole mess,” Randall was saying. “And make sure Phinny—Mr. Throckmorton—is fully aware of all the legal complications he’s bringing on himself.”

“You don’t agree with his actions, then?” Kate asked.

“We’re after the same thing,” Randall said. “I’m trying to work through the system, while Mr. Throckmorton has chosen the more difficult and controversial path of civil disobedience.”

I marveled, not for the first time, at how well Randall had made the transition from the boss of a small, family-run construction company to the highly visible spokesperson for the town of Caerphilly.

Then again, he had years of experience making temperamental clients happy in spite of the delays and other perils typical of construction projects, to say nothing of keeping the peace among his large and unruly clan. Perhaps, after all that, small town politics was a breeze.

“Morning, officers,” Randall called out.

He’d reached the top of the stairs, where the stairway turned into a wide marble veranda with a panoramic view of the town square on one side and a row of white marble pillars on the other. Two of the lender’s security guards, looking stiff and uncomfortably warm in their blue and red uniforms, had emerged from the interior of the courthouse and were lurking at the foot of the pillars. They might have made me just a bit nervous if they hadn’t been accompanied by another figure in an ordinary business suit. I reminded myself to be careful not to call them Flying Monkeys in the reporter’s hearing.

“Morning, Mr. Fisher,” Randall called out, nodding at the suit.

“Good morning, Mr. Shiffley.” Fisher strolled forward to join us. “I gather you’re about to make another attempt to remove the trespasser?”

“I certainly plan to ask Mr. Throckmorton if he thinks his act of civil disobedience has accomplished its purpose,” Randall said. “Can’t promise anything.”

“And what entertainment does the town plan to offer us this afternoon and this evening?” Fisher asked.

“Got a clogging demo starting now, followed by the semifinals of the hog-calling competition,” Randall said. “And after that a polka band all the way from Goochland County. And then Professor Waterston’s students are going to do some kind of patriotic play. Tonight’s another open mike comedy night.”

Fisher couldn’t refrain from wincing slightly at that last bit, which probably meant he’d attended one of the previous open mike comedy nights.

The two exchanged a few more sentences in polite neutral tones. Fisher was one of a handful of what Randall called “the civil ones”—executives from the Evil Lender who didn’t behave badly to all of us.

“But you know they’re only playing good cop/bad cop on you,” I’d told him once.

“Of course,” he’d said. “And if they’re dumb enough to think they’re fooling me, all the better. My goal is to learn just a little more about how their minds work than they learn about mine.”

So I waited patiently while the two of them chatted and studied each other. They’d played out much the same scene dozens of times before. Randall tried to make a very public visit to Mr. Throckmorton every day or so, and made sure the guards saw them exchanging at least a few private words through the barricades. Not only did this annoy the lender’s minions, it kept them from becoming suspicious of our knowledge of what Mr. Throckmorton was up to, or his knowledge of the outside world.

“And it also lets me keep an eye on what those clowns are doing there in the courthouse,” Randall had said. “If the guards start ripping up the marble floors so they can dig down to the basement, I should spot signs.”

I didn’t actually think this idea was all that far-fetched. For some reason, the lender’s attitude toward Mr. Throckmorton had changed in the last few weeks. For almost a year they had seemed to regard the siege as either a nuisance or a joke. The guards from the original security service had made perfunctory patrols through the courthouse and occasionally played pinochle with Mr. Throckmorton through the barricade.

And while we’d slightly resented the old guards when they were here, everyone in town now remembered them fondly. The Flying Monkeys were stiffly uniformed, uniformly humorless, and—to the dismay of our police chief—armed. I tried not to scowl at them, but I couldn’t help thinking that ever since they’d arrived, things had been so much more tense in town.

I also glanced at the third guard who stood at the other end of the veranda with his left arm held stiffly out for the hawk to sit on. Both he and the hawk scanned the skies around them with similar fierce looks on their faces.

But the hawk, I reminded myself, was only doing what came naturally. It wasn’t her fault her owner was trying to use her to destroy someone else’s pets.

I mentally wished the hawk bad luck with her hunting.

Just then Fisher and Randall burst into laughter.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid that’s out of the question,” Fisher said. “But if you come up with anything we
can
help you with, just let me know.”

He strolled back to the guards.

“It’s okay, Lieutenant Wilt,” he said. “Mayor Shiffley can go on in.”

“And these other individuals?” Wilt asked, waving at the rest of us. Clearly, from his expression, he was hoping Fisher would shout “Off with their heads!”

“Reporters, come to witness my attempt at mediation,” Randall said. “And a witness of my own, to make sure I don’t get misquoted by the press.”

“Mayor Shiffley’s entire party can go on in,” Fisher said. He smiled and shook his head as if inviting us to chuckle with him over the silly behavior of the guards. Randall, who didn’t find the guards any more charming than I did, managed a tight smile and a nod.

“Permission to enter,” Wilt said. Fisher disappeared back into the building. “Officer Reilly, escort the visitors.”

“Yes sir!”

Reilly and his boss saluted each other with exaggerated military precision. The
Star-Trib
photographer snapped a few pictures of them doing it. Then Wilt walked aside. Reilly stood at attention beside us.

“Well, let’s get this show on the road,” Randall said.

“Yes, sir,” Reilly said—still at attention, but minus the salute. He appeared to be waiting for us to lead the way.

Randall raised an eyebrow, glanced back at the reporters, and shook his head in a gesture of amused regret.

“Is he talking to himself?” he asked, pointing to Wilt, standing twenty feet away at the far edge of the veranda.

Reilly stood stiffly at attention, pretending not to have heard. Even with his arms clapped stiffly at his sides, you could see that he had a huge and growing sweat stain under each arm, and the beginnings of a heat rash on the back of his neck. Apparently the new guard company was from someplace farther north and either didn’t know how to equip their staff for the Virginia heat or didn’t care about their comfort.