The Double-Jack Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries) (18 page)

Margaret seemed to recover faster than Teddy. She said, “Follow me, Bo. I’ll show you the way down to the basement. It’s kind of a mess, with guns and boxes of bullets piled everywhere. Teddy has always been going to get everything organized, but he’s never got around to it.”

Tully had never seen anything like it. Half the basement had been partitioned off into a large room. Racks of rifles covered every wall, and crates were filled with handguns and boxes of bullets.

Tully said, “We’re looking for rifles, Margaret, so we shouldn’t have to mess with the crates.”

“Do whatever you need to, Bo! Just call Teddy or me if you need any help.”

“Thanks, Margaret. We’ll try to get this done in a hurry so we don’t ruin the rest of your evening.” He knew he had already ruined something a great deal longer than an evening.

The search went much faster than any of them had expected, given the number of firearms present. Within in an hour they had checked all the racks and found two Remington rolling-block rifles in .43 caliber. Teddy came down to the basement and helped them find a box of cartridges for it. The bullets had turned green. “In Cuba, our troops thought green bullets were poisonous and maybe they were,” he said. “They probably had microbes all over them in that hot, moist climate. Many wounded died from infection.”

Tully said, “I’ll have Lurch fire a round from each of these rifles and compare the striations with the striations on the bullets that killed Tom and the boy. That should tell us if Jack Finch was the fellow who shot them.”

“I hate to think our good fortune may have resulted from the murder of two people, but from what I’ve heard about my grandfather, I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“It’s certainly not your fault, Teddy. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days and let you know if the fatal bullets came from either of these two guns.”

“However it turns out, I’d appreciate hearing,” Teddy said. “I’ve also got filing boxes of papers from the mine that
I’ve never looked at. They’re pretty boring, but I’ll check out some of those from the early days and maybe I’ll learn something.”

“That could be a big help, Teddy. Obviously, whoever committed the murders is long dead and there never will be a trial of any kind, but I told Agatha I would solve the mystery for her if I could. So that’s what I’m doing.”

“I understand completely, Bo. I want to know, too. Also, I’d like to do something for Agatha.”

“If you’re thinking about giving her money, she would never accept it,” Tully said.

Pap looked up from a crate of handguns he’d been inspecting. “I’ll tell you something she might appreciate. You could give her that big pile of slag you got up at the mine. It must have been setting there for a hundred years.”

“What on earth would she do with that?” Tully said.

“For one thing, she’s got that road that needs surfacing. I think the slag would make a heck of a road.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, Pap!” Teddy said. “I’ll write you out a paper giving her ownership of the whole pile.”

“Great! I’ll have a couple of dump trucks and a loader come in and pick it up tomorrow.”

“You sure it’s something she’ll like, Pap?” Teddy asked.

“She’ll love it, Teddy, she’ll love it!”

“
NOT THE GUN
,” Lurch said. “I’ve tested them both and neither is the gun that killed the guys in the mine.”

“You’re sure, Lurch?”

“Positive.”

“I can’t say I’m sorry,” Tully said, propping his alligator-skin boots up on his desk. “I don’t think this clears Jack Finch, though. Margaret and Teddy aren’t going to be satisfied. Jack could have used another .43-caliber gun and ditched it somewhere. On the other hand, when your son is named after Theodore Roosevelt and your grandson is, too, I kind of doubt you would ditch a weapon you had picked up during your campaign in Cuba with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. It’s one heck of a souvenir. I think the rifles you just checked are only some of the rifles Jack brought home with him. There’s a third .43-caliber rifle somewhere. Or at least there was.”

“I’m sorry it wasn’t one of these, boss.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, too. It would have wrapped this mystery up for Agatha. At least she’s getting a nice road out of it.”

“How come?”

“Pap is up at the Finch Mine right now, loading a huge pile of slag onto dump trucks. I guess the slag will crunch up into a nice surface.”

“You trust Pap a whole lot more than you used to.”

“Nope, Lurch, I don’t. He’s got me worried sick about the whole deal.”

Lurch went back to his computer shaking his head.

Tully dialed Susan. “How about lunch, sweetheart?”

“Anytime, Bo,” her assistant said. “But we’d better not let Susan find out.”

“Good idea, Amy,” he said.

Susan came on laughing. He knew Amy had told her. He had forgotten they sounded almost identical on the phone. Amy isn’t that bad looking, either, he thought. “Ah,” he said, “at last I’ve got the right sweetheart.”

“Yes, you do. Lunch sounds great.”

“Super,” he said. “I’ll meet you at Crabbs.”

“Why do we always eat at Crabbs?”

“Because I don’t have to think what to order for lunch at Crabbs. I always get the beef dip and fries, and it’s always good.”

“That’s what I like about you, Bo, your sense of adventure.”

“Usually I don’t go to such extremes. See you at noon.” He hung up.

Daisy yelled at him through the open door. “Pick up on two, Bo. It’s a Mr. Finch.”

Bo shuddered. Pap had probably been caught up to no good. “Hello, Teddy,” he said. “It’s about Pap, isn’t it?”

“Pap? No, I haven’t seen Pap. You worried something happened to him, Bo?”

“No, Teddy, not at all. What can I do for you?”

“You know how I told you I was going to look through those old papers we took out of the mine office?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I found something of interest. My grandfather didn’t start the mine. A man by the name of Blunt did, Howard Blunt. He took Jack Finch on as a partner about a year after the mine started. Six months later there is no mention of Blunt. From then on, the mine is called Finch.”

“What happened to Blunt?”

“I don’t know. He just vanished. Maybe they had a falling-out. I suspect Jack Finch was the kind of man you didn’t want to have a falling-out with. I looked through dozens of papers and there is just no mention of Blunt. There’s some indication this Blunt fellow and my grandfather joined the Rough Riders together.”

“I think I see where you’re going with this, Teddy. If Jack Finch signed onto the mine after it got started, he probably wasn’t the one who discovered Tom’s little mine. Therefore, he wasn’t the one who killed Tom and the boy.”

“That’s where I’m going with it, Bo.”

“You got any idea what happened to Howard Blunt?”

“Just my guess.”

“About the same as mine, I bet. You know of any Blunts live around here, Teddy?”

“No, not around here. There’s a Blunt that owns an accounting firm in Spokane. It’s an unusual name. He could be a descendent.”

“It so happens I have to make a trip to Spokane. I’ll check him out.”

At lunch, Tully went with beef dip and fries and Susan went with the fish-and-chips. “I have to admit,” she said, “Crabbs has the best fish-and-chips in all of Idaho. England, on the other hand, has the best fish-and-chips in the world.”

“You’ve been to England?”

“Yes, when I was twelve. My father and mother took us four girls with them when Dad was on a sabbatical from the university. We lived in an apartment down in Cornwall for a month. The fish-and-chips were absolutely scrumptious!”

“I’ve never been anywhere,” Tully said. “I’d like to get to England someday. Maybe we could go together.”

“Maybe,” she said. “You would have to be a lot more attentive, though.”

“I’m working on it,” he said. He wondered if the flyboy had been attentive. Apparently not.

“I do think you’re still hung up on your wife, Bo. It’s been ten years since Ginger died. It’s really time you put that part of your life behind you. People have to move on.”

“I have moved on,” he said.

“But not all that far.”

HE PULLED HIS
sheriff’s department Explorer up in front of Jean Runyan’s art gallery in Spokane, took the painting out of the back, and hauled it inside. Jean was an attractive woman with gray, neatly coifed hair and deceptively kind eyes behind rimless glasses. “Oh, Bo, wonderful to see you! I’ve been hoping you would bring me something. But it’s huge.”

He stood the painting up and turned it around so she could see it.

“Oh, my gosh!” she said. “It’s wonderful! I have patrons of who will kill for that painting!”

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I want Sid Brown to have first shot at it.”

“But, Bo, you’re depriving me of a bloodbath among Spokane’s art patrons!”

“I’m sorry, but I want Sid to have it.”

“He’ll have to offer at least twenty grand.”

“I expect he will. I don’t have his phone number, Jean, but he owns the Giggling Loon restaurant in Boise.”

“I know Sid,” she said. “I’ve sold him half a dozen of your watercolors at ridiculously low prices. Now he’s going to pay!”

Tully turned and left, so he wouldn’t have to hear Jean’s merciless laugh. It was the sort of thing that could haunt a person’s dreams.

Raymond Blunt’s office was on the top floor of the Blunt Building, an indication that the Blunt family had done all right for itself over the years. He told the receptionist he was Sheriff Bo Tully to see Mr. Blunt.

The girl turned pale and gasped, “Not again!”

Tully imagined her boss scurrying down a rear fire escape. “I’m not here on enforcement business,” he told her. “I just need some information about his grandfather.”

The girl disappeared through a door behind her and presently returned with a bald, wizened little man not over five-foot-five. His white eyebrows were bunched up in a frown.

“What is it you want?” he growled.

“I would like some information about your grandfather,” Tully said, “if Howard Blunt was your grandfather.”

The little man responded with a facial tic, then said, “Come on back to my office.”

The office was large and old with a great deal of dark wood on the walls and four tiny windows on two sides of the
corner office. Blunt motioned to a chair in front of his desk. Tully sat down.

“So what is it you want to know about my grandfather?” he asked.

Tully thought he should give Blunt a little background first. He explained about the murders of Tom Link and Sean O’Boyle.

“Sounds like something my grandfather might have been involved in,” Blunt said. “My understanding is that he was a thoroughly nasty man. My own father, who wasn’t exactly a prince of a human being, was terrified of him.”

“Must have been the standard for fathers in those days,” Tully said. “Do you know if your grandfather was a member of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders?”

“Yes, I certainly do. I tired of hearing about it at a very young age.”

“Apparently, he and Jack Finch joined up together and were buddies all through the Spanish-American War. From what I have been able to learn, your grandfather started what became known as the Finch Mine.”

“That’s my understanding. Then one day he simply disappeared without leaving a trace. From what I understand, my family at the time was not in the least grieved to have him vanish. They generally felt they owed Jack Finch a debt of gratitude.”

“So they thought Finch had something to do with your grandfather’s disappearance?”

“Oh, yes. If you’d known Jack Finch, I think you might have, too. He apparently was an unholy terror.”

Tully tugged thoughtfully on the corner of his mustache.

“The reason I’m here, Mr. Blunt, is that I’m looking for the weapon used in the murder of a miner named Tom Link and a fourteen-year-old boy by the name of Sean O’Boyle. I suspect your grandfather may have brought back a .43-caliber rolling-block rifle with him from Cuba. The bullets for it probably would have been green, not unusual, but the moist climate of Cuba may have made them even greener.”

Blunt leaned back in his chair and rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. After a bit he said, “I’m not much of a gun person, Sheriff, but I do remember a box of green bullets. I gave both the bullets and the rifle to one of our local museums. The curators were putting together a display of Spanish-American War artifacts involving people from this area. Apparently, the war was quite popular with our residents at the time. I’m not much of a museum person, so I don’t know if the display ever got set up or not.”

Tully thanked Blunt and told him if he ever determined the rifle at the museum was the murder weapon, he would let him know.

“Don’t bother,” Blunt growled.

THE MUSEUM WAS
a large boxy affair with a great deal of exterior metal and glass. Tully wasn’t much of a museum person, either, and the place made him nervous. Museums always gave him the feeling he was supposed to know something he had never even heard of. A striking young woman took him back to the director’s office, her high heels clicking smartly on the floor, reminding him of Daisy. She knocked on a door and was told to enter. The room turned out to be a workshop of some sort and the director was dressed in a pair of dusty gray coveralls. The young woman said, “Sheriff Tully, this is our director, Mr. Mullan,” and then left. Tully could hear her footsteps receding down the museum hallway.

“Sheriff Bo Tully,” the director said. “I am aware of your
reputation, as an artist that is. I’m afraid I don’t follow the crime scene much.”

“That’s fine with me,” Tully said. “But it’s the crime scene that brings me here.”

“Indeed? Well, how may I be of service to you in that regard?”

Tully told him about the 1927 murders of Tom Link and Sean O’Boyle and the rifle that may have been used in the killings.

The director said, “Nineteen twenty-seven! You take your crime-solving very seriously, Sheriff.”

“Yes, I do. Usually, I don’t take on crimes quite this old, but one of the victims was the father of a friend of mine. I suspect there may have been a third murder, but I will be satisfied if I can simply find the rifle that was used in the first two. I assume you keep a record of the various donors. The rifle I’m looking for was donated to the museum by a Mr. Raymond Blunt.”