4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4 Read online

  Billy stared at his brother’s amazing red hair and raised an eyebrow.

  “Hey, there was this guy, DeGraaf, you know? He used to go to the high school, and he had all kinds of tattoos on him and they hired him. So, okay, I’ll have to take care of the hair for a while…and um, maybe the ears, I’m not sure about that…and yeah, I’ll have to study…and…you don’t think I can do it, do you?”

  “I ain’t said anything.”

  “It’s all over your face…you just wait and see.”

  “I have enough sons in danger. Don’t you go joining them, Henry, you hear?”

  “Being an ET ain’t the same thing, Ma. Anyway, I thought I had the solution to the locked door thing this afternoon but it didn’t work.”

  “What did you think?”

  “See, I was poking around an old door and noticed that the lock…it was set like the one we busted, you know, on the back of the door…I see this old lock just fall off the door and I think, what if the lock was busted before we got there, see?”

  “See what?”

  “Come on Billy, you’re the cop, if the door was already broke and Lydell just pretended it was locked up tight, who’d know? Then when the door’s busted open, you just see screws lying around and you don’t ask if maybe they were pulled out before.”

  Billy nodded, impressed. “So why doesn’t it work?”

  “I banged the door down and I’m here to tell you that lock was set in solid. I had to whack it twice before she gave way.”

  “Lydell ain’t your candidate?”

  “Nah, he might bore you to death, or talk you to death but…no, shooting a stranger don’t seem likely.”

  “So what’s your theory now, Mr. ET?”

  “Don’t have one. Wait, how about this? You and me have a contest. The one that figures it out first wins and the loser has to buy dinner somewhere nice.”

  Billy grinned. “You’re on, only we add that Ma gets in on the dinner.”

  “Done. I’m thinking mistaken identity, now. What’s your guess?”

  Billy narrowed his eyes and said nothing.

  Chapter 6

  Karl parked the cruiser in front of the Sheriff’s Department and waited for Ike to get out. “How about mistaken identity?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Suppose the real victim was the guy who switched places with Grotz? If we track down that man, we may get a lead.”

  “It’s a possibility, I guess. Of course, the killer would have to know he was registered at Mrs. Antonelli’s. That’s a lot of information for one person to know. Who would?”

  “Mrs. Antonelli and anyone with access to her books.”

  “Yes, and that would rule her out as well because she would know about the change—the killer wouldn’t. We need to find out how she tracked her guests. If they were in a computer, for example, then they’d be available to anyone who could access it and the change might not show. But there is a more important question we need to answer first.”

  “What’s that?”

  Ike slid out of the door, stood and stretched. He bent over and peered back into the car. “Cui bono?”

  “Kwee what?”

  “Latin. Cui bono—who benefits? In books, mystery stories, the fascination for readers lies in the locked room. They rarely ask why in the world the corpse is in a locked room in the first place. But we should. What is the point of a locked room killing? Who benefits from all that manipulation? If you were going to kill Grotz or the other man, wouldn’t you just slip in and pop him? Why go to all the trouble to set up the locked room business?”

  “Kooey bono. Right, I got it. Okay, my first thought is, the killer benefits.”

  “Of course he does, but how? That’s the question. In what way does he benefit? If we knew the answer to that, we’d be at least halfway home.”

  “Well, suppose the motive to kill him was obvious or easy to figure out, wouldn’t that finger the perp right away? And then he’d be an easy arrest. But before we could bust him we’d have to be able to prove he did it and—”

  “He or she. We don’t know it was a he.”

  “Whatever. Even if we were positive we had him or her—if we can’t put him in the room—we have nothing. No matter how carefully we construct the case, it’s circumstantial. Unless we can show how it got done, he…she walks.”

  Ike straightened up. “So, that would mean that the killer believes he could be fingered and needs to set up the situation so that he can’t be convicted because we can’t prove he did it, even if we’re sure.”

  “Short of a confession, that’s right. Clever isn’t it.”

  “Yes, and then again,” Ike stared off in space for a moment, “it might involve something else entirely.”

  “Like what?”

  Ike shook his head. “I need to talk to Leon Weitz.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Local historian.”

  ***

  “Is she in?”

  Agnes Ewalt took her duties as the personal secretary to the President of Callend College seriously. She looked up, started a smile, but seeing Ike in the doorway, let it fade.

  “I’ll see,” she mumbled, and pushed a button on the desk phone that served as an intercom. “Dr. Harris, there’s a man here to see you.”

  Ike could barely make out her reply.

  “Sorry, she’s busy right now. Perhaps you could come back later or make an appointment.”

  Agnes had never really taken to Ike and over the eleven months they had known each other, their relationship had worsened, just as the relationship between Ike and Ruth had bloomed. He never understood why. Today it seemed she had ramped up the enmity ten-fold. He sighed and strode across the room and pushed into Ruth’s office. Agnes started to protest and then looked away.

  “Hi there, Sheriff. What can I do for you? Make it quick, I have a meeting in a few minutes and there’s someone out there who wants to see me.”

  “Agnes said a man.”

  “Yes. I asked her to have him come back later.”

  “I’m the man.”

  “You? Why didn’t she…? Oh dear. I’m sorry Ike, she has a bee in her bonnet about you and—”

  “It’s not in her bonnet.”

  “What? Oh, I see. Well, time heals all wounds or something like that.”

  “In her case, I think Groucho Marx had it right, ‘time wounds all heels.’”

  “Look, I’ll talk to her, okay? Let it go. Now, why are you here?”

  “I came to see Leon Weitz and while I was on the premises, I thought I’d drop by and see how the college’s beleaguered President was doing and…” The clock on the mantle started its strike cycle and pinged away. “You should get a better clock.”

  “What’s wrong with my clock? It was a going away present.”

  “I know, but it looks silly on that shelf. You have this beautiful fake Georgian office and then you put a piece of abstract clock art on the mantle.”

  “Well, it’s the only clock I had that belonged in an office, so there it is. When did you take up interior decorating, anyway?”

  Ike put his hand on his hip, bent one knee, lifted an eyebrow, and looked over his shoulder at her. Her eyebrows, in turn, descended into a sharp V. “Don’t you dare, Schwartz, you know how I feel about stereotyping.”

  He straightened up and grinned. “You are so easy.”

  “Smart ass. You have thirty seconds to finish whatever you came to say and then I’m calling Agnes in here to escort you to the door and out of the building.”

  “Dinner and a movie?”

  “What time? Wait a minute, what movie?”

  “Your choice. I’ll pick one up at the rental store, grab some Chinese take-out and meet you at your place at…six thirty?”

  “You pick it, but no macho war-is-beautiful flick. I’m not in the mood to see The Dirty Dozen again. And why is it always my place? What are you hiding in that apartment of yours?”

  “It’s too small to
hide anything. We could go to the A-frame. That suit?”

  “Much better. My faculty has enough trouble without you chowing down in the president’s house every whipstitch.”

  “Not chowing down, I think. Chowing down is not the problem.”

  “No, I guess not, unless that’s a euphemism for—”

  “It isn’t, at least as far as I know. So, you have other problems in the halls of academe?”

  “Maybe. I have a meeting tonight to discuss a rumor making the rounds that the Board of Trustees is going to move we go coed, maybe by merging with some well endowed, but land poor college up the road somewhere.”

  “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “I know, but later would be better. If you’re going to change the whole personality of a place, it needs to be thought through. Otherwise you get…what’s the academic equivalent to oatmeal?”

  “I dare not say. You may have taught there at one time or another. A degree mill that grinds out academic oatmeal. Nice metaphor. And you’re right. Some thought ought to be given to where the board wants this new entity to go, before they just throw open the gates and assume that what works in a single sex institution will work in a coed one.”

  “Well, at least we agree on that. But you are not on the board and so that message may not be heard.” She sighed and frowned. “I don’t know how long the meeting will last. How about I just meet you at your A-frame and we skip the dinner?”

  “You remember how to get there?”

  “I remember. And I’ll bring an overnight, in case it snows.”

  “It doesn’t snow in the Shenandoah Valley in April.”

  “Well, it may just snow somewhere, Wyoming maybe, you never know. Now, go away before I call Agnes.”

  Ike left the college’s main building and walked to his car. Two students passed by and smiled a greeting that barely disguised a knowing look and a glance at the President’s office window. His police car had become a fixture on the campus and, Ike guessed, exacerbated Ruth’s problem relationship with him. The townsfolk would have the same feelings if her Volvo were seen parked on the street near his apartment.

  They could not ignore it any longer. They’d decided to wait, to be patient. She needed time, she’d said. She had a career to consider. And now, Ruth’s future at Callend College might be protracted or curtailed. Who knew? She had offers—some very good ones and the rumored winds of change to a coed campus might be just the thing to blow her right out of town. As for his career, he was the sheriff and he was comfortable with that, but he thought of it only as something he did, something he enjoyed, but not something he needed, not a career, not a future. He didn’t need the money or the aggravation, either. Wait and see, he thought. He imagined he heard Ruth’s clock strike the quarter. The clock tower atop the main building began to bong at the same time and drowned out any possibility of hearing anything at all.

  He always parked the cruiser near a clump of old azaleas at the end of the driveway, but there was no mistaking the obvious. The black and white paint scheme and shield on the door screamed for attention. The department was due to trade two of its oldest vehicles and he decided then that he would have one of them delivered unmarked. It wouldn’t fool everybody but it might take some of the heat off. Besides, every sheriff’s department needed at least one unmarked car.

  Chapter 7

  Ruth dug her heels into the carpet and propelled her swivel chair backward onto the oak flooring and over to the window. She watched Ike stroll down the walkway toward the clump of azaleas where he parked his patrol car. Somehow, he’d arrived at the bizarre notion that if he parked it there it would be less noticeable. She sighed and rolled the chair back to her desk. Papers were strewn across its surface. She really needed to get to work. God only knew if the rumors about accepting men at Callend were true, but her faculty needed to be calmed down. What they did not know, but she’d been told, was the rumors included a possible merger with Carter Union College—an all male school short on space and long on endowments. It would be a perfect fit. Callend’s enrollment dropped dangerously after the removal of the Dillon Art collection, previously stored on the campus. As it formed the backbone of the school’s art department, students who might have enrolled at Callend drifted elsewhere. CU needed facilities; Callend needed financial security. There could be only one president of the combination. And if all the rumors were true, she might soon find herself in the job market. She kept a file of offers from other institutions in her lower right-hand drawer. One or two of them might still be available. Who knew?

  Ike hadn’t said a word about their long weekend in Toronto in January. Then, neither had she. Was all his talk about clocks just a subtle way to remind her, or maybe just a Freudian thing? Perhaps she’d read way too much into a simple conversation. She closed her eyes briefly—a long blink. He’d told her in Canada that he’d wait as long as needed and that was his last word on it. Maybe at the A-frame tonight, at his hideaway in the mountains, maybe then they could talk and…She squeezed her eyes shut, hard this time, to hold back the tears. In frustration, she hammered the desktop with her hand. In doing so, one of Agnes’ newly sharpened pencils somehow managed to stab the fat part of her palm.

  “Ow! Agnes,” she yelled, ignoring the intercom, “do we have any band-aids?”

  Now, at least, the tears wouldn’t provoke questions.

  ***

  Five miles away, Jonathan Lydell stood motionless at his desk. He pulled the clock winder from his pocket and looked at it as if for the first time. He let it fall to the desk top, then, a frown on his face, swept it into an open drawer. Had the sheriff seen anything out of the ordinary? It would take a fair intelligence to unravel a locked room murder and he doubted that the sheriff, the son of a hack Jewish politician, possessed that capacity. He hoped not. Once he established Bellmore as a tourist attraction, a second unsolved murder would add a real incentive for people to come and that could ensure its success. He’d put a sign on the highway:

  VISIT HISTORIC BELLMORE!

  COME AND SEE THE ROOM WHERE

  TWO UNSOLVED MURDERS TOOK PLACE!

  How very convenient. Almost as if he’d planned it. He slammed the drawer shut and smiled. No, they’d never figure it out. He would add a bookstore in the third slave cabin. A knock at the door brought him back into the present.

  “Yes?”

  “Daddy?” His daughter, Martha Marie, fifty-something and fading, slipped into the room looking, he thought, a little worse for wear.

  “Well, I see you’re finally up.”

  “What was all the commotion about? I thought I heard sirens and men clumping about.”

  “Well yes, Em, we had a murder last night.”

  “What? Someone was killed? Where?”

  “Here. You recall your friend Grotz, who stayed in the stranger room last night?”

  “I would hardly call him my friend. My God, he’s dead?”

  “You spent almost an hour tête á tête with him last night. Seemed pretty friendly to me. Yes, shot to death.”

  “My God. We just had a drink together, that’s all.”

  “Just a drink? You were as thick as thieves last night and I don’t want to know what you were proposing, thank you.”

  “Daddy, I never…he’s really dead?”

  “As I said…How would you know what you said or did?” His daughter lowered her eyes and clasped her hands tightly together, presumably to reduce their shaking.

  “At any rate, someone put a couple of bullets in him,” Lydell continued. “We had to break down the door to find him. Seems the room was locked from the inside.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. You didn’t hear anything last night? No, of course you didn’t. You were too far gone to hear anything—as usual.”

  “Daddy, that’s not fair. I only had—”

  “Your usual. And God only knows how many pills you added to the mix.”

  “I didn’t…I don’t think…”
>
  “It doesn’t matter. I told the police you were indisposed, but they will be back later today and want to question you.”

  “Yes, thank you. Did you hear from Benji, yet?”

  “Your son is still in Richmond, plotting how to get rich without expending any energy. He told me, in great detail, that he and his partners were looking into class action suits for victims of salicylic acid overdose, whatever that is.”

  “It’s aspirin.”

  “Drugs. You would know. At any rate, they hope to get a multimillion dollar settlement from some pharmaceutical companies and, of course, keep forty percent for their effort.”

  Martha Marie’s face brightened. “Is that possible?”

  “What? Cheat companies out of money because they have deep pockets and insurance. Of course it is. We have a completely new class of millionaire lawyers who’ve developed the technique, and a legion of imitators, like my grandson, who hope to mine the same lode. It’s shameful.”

  “But it might work.”

  “Might—will, I think. Judges are not what they used to be. And juries…well. All these new people…no sense of history or values moving into power…the aftershock of the sixties, if you ask me.”

  Jonathan was on a rant. His daughter drifted out of the room and into the study where a whiskey decanter and glasses were arranged on a silver tray atop a mahogany credenza. Lydell finished his speech to the now empty room. His daughter, no doubt, had filled her head with hopes of a newly wealthy son, who could return her to the lost lifestyle of country clubs and parties. A lifestyle forfeited by her divorce from Franklin Pierce Winslow, heir to the Winslow Sugar fortune. The divorce had been messy with accusations of infidelity, drug abuse, and public drunkenness—all attributed to his daughter. The upshot—she received a very modest alimony settlement and would not have even been entitled to that had certain tapes been played in court. To spare her that, and at the insistence of her father who had been forced to view them, she accepted the proverbial “offer she couldn’t refuse.” Now she lived at Bellmore in an apparent alcoholic haze, taking up space and contributing nothing.