He Needed Killing Too, page 11
“I’ve been looking at it. Haven’t gotten anywhere but I’ve started putting it into a database.” I stood up and started cleaning off the table.
Ward made a face. “Is that going to help?” He picked up his empty bottle and glass and followed me into the kitchen.
“So far the only thing I’ve found is that each page has got a 1Y, 2Y, 3Y, or 4Y on it. What the heck that stands for I don’t know—yet.”
Ward scratched his head. “Once a year, twice a year? It might make more sense if we knew what he was keeping records on.”
“Why use the letter then if everything was yearly? Poor database design. Go home.”
Chapter 12
Tuesday Lunch
Last night, after Ward left, I called Bobby, ostensibly to ask if she was going to Philip Douglas’s funeral but really just to hear her voice. It turned out she was going and even seemed a little surprised that I had had to ask.
The plan was for the Press to shut down at noon since all the office staff were going to the funeral at two o’clock. It was just going to be a graveside service as he had no family and hadn’t been much of a churchgoer. I interpreted “not much of a churchgoer” as being somewhere between agnostic and totally uninterested. It wasn’t until I had hung up after talking to Bobby that I thought to wonder who had organized the service. I’d have to find out, it might be important.
Afterward, before I’d given up and gone to bed, I’d poked around with the ledger for a little while and hadn’t gotten anywhere. I decided to ask Bobby to look at it as it might have something to do with the Press—some kind of method of keeping track of things? Maybe it wasn’t a code after all? Anyway, I needed help and she’d offered—if there was anything she could do.
Since we were going “funeraling” as it were, it was easy enough to decide what to wear—the funeral/wedding/interview suit—dark with only a faint pattern, if any at all. With it the traditional white shirt, somber wine-colored tie, and black dress shoes. I wondered what single men did in other sections of the country. How did you know what to wear if you didn’t know the traditions and didn’t have a significant other to ask?
Before I left, I checked to make sure there was plenty of water in the water bowls inside and out. Satisfied on that count, I put Tan in the yard, filled up The Black’s dry food dish, and headed for the car. I’d put the set of photocopies Ward had given me in the car already, so I wouldn’t forget them. They were in a folder sitting on the passenger seat so I was sure Bobby would see them.
As I drove to the Press, I began to wonder just what I was going to detect at the funeral and how I was going to go about detecting. I didn’t think taking pictures of people I didn’t recognize was something one “did” at graveside services. If there was a guestbook maybe I could get a copy of it from the funeral home before they gave it to—to whom? He had no wife or children. After Eleanor’s funeral they—the funeral home people—had given me the guest book and a box of thank-you notes. It had taken a while, but I’d worked my way through it even though it seemed that Eleanor had known a heck a lot more people than I did—or than we did for that matter. I shook my head and decided I’d have to play it by ear. Bobby would know who was from the Press. Maybe between us we could spot a potential suspect or suspects.
I pulled into the Press’s parking lot. We were going out to lunch before the service. Bobby had wanted to go to a place called OC’s—a new restaurant in town and the first one advertising that it offered “California cuisine”—whatever that might be. I parked in one of the visitor spots, got out of the car, and headed toward the door. Before I could get there, Bobby walked out and headed my way. I stopped and watched as she approached. She usually wore slacks or jeans but today she was dressed in what I guess was the female equivalent of my funeral suit—a sedate black dress, square neckline, no obvious jewelry, small black handbag, and some black low heeled pumps. I say pumps but I really don’t know what pumps are. Eleanor used to say pumps and I used to nod as if I understood.
Anyway, Bobby had more sense than to wear high heels to a graveside service. I had smiled at the first sight of her and the closer she got the broader my smile got.
She looked wonderful.
“Ford, you clean up pretty well!”
“Thanks, lady. You look pretty fine yourself.”
I turned and walked beside her as we made our way to my car. It was a nice day, warm in the direct sunlight, but pleasant in the shade. It would be hot at the graveyard but there didn’t seem to be any chance of rain. I offered my opinion. “Not a bad day for a funeral.”
“Not a bad day for lunch. I’m hungry.”
I laughed, opened the car door, and held it while she got in. “First things first. Direct and to the point. That’s one of the things I love about you.” I was shocked to hear myself say that. It was the first time either one of us had said anything about love.
Bobby picked up the folder of photocopies before she sat down then put it in her lap and smoothed her dress. I started to close the door as she reached for the seat belt. “One thing you love?” She was looking down at the envelope.
“Out of lots and lots of things.” So we’d gotten past my use of the word. She’d used it too. I went back around the car to the driver’s side, opened the door, and slid in under the steering wheel.
“Well, I’ve got a question.”
“And it is?” I started the car but turned to look at her before putting it in gear.
She tapped her index finger on the folder she was holding. “What is this that I didn’t sit on?”
“Oh, I forgot. Something I thought you could look at during lunch. It’s a puzzle and I need some help.”
“OK.” She put her purse on top of it. “But I didn’t realize I was going to work for my lunch when I said I’d come.”
I put the car in reverse and eased out of the parking space. The Press was located far enough away from the student parking lots that there wasn’t much pedestrian traffic. There were some spots on campus where there were so many pedestrians that a driver was hard put not to run somebody down. The fact that, as far as I knew, nobody had been run over speaks well for the drivers—because the students are asking for it—at least that’s the way it looks.
It was a short drive to the restaurant. Since we were headed away from campus we got there quickly. As I pulled up I wondered for a moment what it had been before it had turned into OC’s. In a college town, well, this college town anyway, the turnover in the restaurant business is pretty amazing. Once a building gets used as an eating place it sort of stays one. I remembered now. This had been an upscale steak house six months ago. Forty-five dollar steak entrees put a pretty big dent in a student’s wallet. I think they had done all right at the beginning of the semester when everybody was flush, but business had dropped off pretty quickly.
I was able to find a parking space—generally a bad sign, but we were early enough that it wasn’t conclusive. By the time I had gotten around to Bobby’s side of the car she’d opened the door but hadn’t gotten out. I held the door and looked in the car. Bobby smiled back at me. “I’m sort of out of practice at having doors opened for me.”
“It’s that younger crowd that you hang around with.”
Once we entered OC’s we had to stand and let our eyes adjust. Was it Californian to have the lights so dim? Before us was a counter with three cash register stations each manned by an attractive young lady, smiling and ready to take our orders.
“The menu is over there on the wall. We just tell them what we want, pay for it, and then go sit down. They’ll give us a number to put on a little stand so the servers will know how to find us.”
“I thought you hadn’t been here.”
Bobby was carefully scrutinizing the wall. “They were talking about it at work. I think the soups change every day.”
The menu was mostly sandwiches and salads, some being variations of the others—a grilled chicken salad or sandwich, that kind of thing. I wasn’t sure what made this “Californian” except there seemed to be a lot of sun-dried tomatoes, avocados, and pine nuts advertised as showing up in dishes. Maybe that’s what did it. I glanced at the sandwiches that were listed and found one named after the restaurant. I figure that in the food business you don’t put your name on something unless you think it’s pretty good. Generally I’m right.
“You know what you want?” Bobby nodded and we stepped up to the first register. Bobby ordered a salad and water to drink while I ordered the OC sandwich and iced tea. Money changed hands and then we were given a plastic square with a number on it and empty plastic cups. It turns out that we were responsible for getting our drinks, but the food would be delivered. As this meant I could create my own mixture of lemonade and iced tea without having to explain it to an uncomprehending and uninterested server, I was pleased. Still, I’m not convinced that making the customers serve themselves is the way to go. I kind of like the idea of being waited on. What else am I paying for? But maybe this was the California touch?
As we left the drink station and started looking for a table, I noticed that the place was beginning to fill up. I glanced around trying to figure the traffic pattern. I hate sitting right in front of the door into the kitchen. There is always a constant stream of servers coming back and forth. Equally, I don’t like to be too close to the entrance. I’d rather sit in a backwater where the foot traffic is lighter. I spotted a table for two near a corner and pointed to it. “How about over there?”
She nodded agreement and we eased our way across the floor between the tables that were carefully arranged to be too close together. Maybe that’s what they meant by Californian? I decided that if retirement didn’t pan out and I didn’t make it as a detective that I wasn’t going to apply to wait on tables here. You’d have to be rail thin to squeeze between the diners and I’m not.
I started to pull the chair out for Bobby and nearly hurt my back. Damn thing had to weigh fifty pounds. “Uumpth,” I said.
“What’s that?” Bobby sat down in the chair and looked up at me.
“The chair. It must weigh a ton.”
She tried to shift it and her eyes widened. “Who wants a chair this heavy?”
I was able to help her push the chair closer to the table and then dragged my own chair out far enough for me to get into it. “Maybe they don’t want the patrons to be able to use the chairs if a fight breaks out? Lord knows nobody’s going to swing one of those things over their head.”
I put the plastic square into a loop on top of a metal stand and made sure the number was facing the general direction of the kitchen. Seemed to me that the owners had made this place hard enough to work in, I didn’t want to add to it. I had my back to a wall—Bobby and the rest of the restaurant could absorb my full attention.
“Do you think the clientele is likely to get into fights?”
I looked around paying more attention to what the crowd looked like and realized that it was predominately female. Not only that, the females tended to be young and attractive—or so it seemed to a casual observer. I straightened up and glanced around the room and wondered where the men were. There were tables of two, four, six, or eight and only occasionally would there be a man seated at one of them. Oh, there were a few tables where men were sitting, but they tended to be a decade or so older than the women.
“I don’t get it. Why aren’t there a bunch of college-age guys here?”
Bobby smiled. “Frank said that he really liked the way the restaurant was decorated. He called it eye candy.”
I decided that it wasn’t the right time to ask Bobby if she could explain to me why I kept on seeing parties of girls at nice restaurants and rarely any guys with them. I made a mental note to remember to ask the question when it seemed appropriate.
Bobby held up the folder. “Want to show me the puzzle? Or should we wait until after we eat?”
“It won’t take long to point out the puzzle, it’s the solution that’s taking up all the time. Go ahead, take a look.” I had highlighted the puzzling titles with a yellow marker.
She slipped the pages out of the folder and glanced at the first couple of pages. I could see a double line form between her eyebrows as she glanced from page to page.
“They are photocopies of pages in a ledger that Philip Douglas had in his safe.”
The lines between her eyes disappeared. “So what do I get for solving the mystery?”
“Dinner at any restaurant in town—your choice—the sky’s the limit.” I couldn’t lose. It was a great excuse to take her out.
“Including wine and dessert?”
“And preprandial drinks.” Maybe I should check on the expense account issue?
“It’s the rifles.”
Like clockwork the waiter arrived with our food before I could find out what she meant. After we got it straight that the salad was hers, the sandwich was mine, and the waiter could leave, I repeated what she had said. “The rifles?”
The salad was in a bowl so large that it partially blocked my view of Bobby. The first visual negative I’d found in the place. “What do you mean the rifles?” She was serenely using her fork to poke at the salad uncovering the goodies that had been included with the bleu cheese and blackened steak slices—sun-dried tomatoes and avocados, no doubt.
She looked up from her salad, saw the total confusion writ large on my face, and took pity on me—she put down her fork. “These strings of letters and numbers are on those brass plaques Philip had mounted next to the rifles—little tiny font in the bottom right corner of the plaque? You might not have noticed them, I didn’t at first. I’m not sure when I did notice them but when I did I wondered about them.
“So I asked Philip about them and what they stood for.” She shook her head from side to side and picked up her fork. “All he said was that it was a code he’d come up with to identify the pieces in his collection. What a jerk.” With that she stabbed the bowl and pulled out a fork full of lettuce and popped it in her mouth.
I sagged in my chair. “A secret code to identify the rifles? What ailed the man? Why not just write out something like ‘Remington Model A, circa 1900, 48 caliber, muzzle loader?’”
Bobby stopped chewing and swallowed. “I don’t think a Remington is a muzzle loader.”
“And I think you paid way more attention to his collection than it deserved.” I looked down at my sandwich. It was a hoagie roll made out of real bread, nice golden crust, and hand sliced. There was a sun-dried tomato, and a couple of pine nuts along with something that looked like feta that had escaped the roll along with a little sauce.
“Oh he was always so secretive about the rifles and where he’d gotten them and who might have owned them before. You couldn’t help wondering.”
“I could have.” Fortunately they’d cut the sandwich in half. I picked up one half and could feel that instability in a sandwich that had more filling than the integrity of the bread could contain. Quickly I brought my other hand up to add stability and stuck a corner of the sandwich in my mouth. I took a large bite.
My theory about dishes that are named after the establishment proved true, once again. It was delicious.
“Philip was so proud of the rifles and so secretive about how he got them that I once accused him of having the gun that John Wilkes Booth used to kill Lincoln.”
I was still chewing so I just looked at her questioningly.
“He just pointed out to me that Booth had used a Derringer—a handgun he wouldn’t consider worthy of collecting—but there was a 30-06 of Hemingway’s that he’d be proud to hang on the wall.
Bobby looked at me as if to see whether I understood. “Ernest Hemingway? He mentions a 30-06 in some of his stories. Philip said that no one knew what had become of Hemingway’s rifle.”
I swallowed and decided not to expose the extent of my ignorance of the works of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway at this moment. “Well, the shotgun he killed himself with is still probably police evidence.” Having proved I knew something about Hemingway’s death if not his literature, I returned to the puzzle.
“So all I have to do is to match up the,” I pointed at the sheets of paper that Bobby had left on the table, “the titles—is what I was calling them—with the rifles at the Press?”
“That’s right. We can do that after lunch—no, after the funeral. Oh, that’s right the Press is closed for the day.”
“Tomorrow is plenty soon enough.” I settled in to enjoy the sandwich and what I could swear were home-made potato chips. Part of a puzzle solved, good food, and a good looking companion, the day was turning out pretty well.
#
The minister at the graveside had never met Philip Douglas or so he said. I’m not sure if it was Christian charity or an arrogance that Christ would have disapproved of that had made him willing to preside over the funeral, but I will admit he did his best. It can’t be easy to find the words to bury Caesar when most of the people in the audience were—all-in-all—better off with him dead—at least happier anyway. And there was the chance that one of the people here had actually usurped the divine prerogative and had taken the man’s life. Like I said, it was a challenge that not every minister would have accepted.
It was a sparse crowd, more like the graveside service for an elderly person—one of those who had been living in the eddies and backwaters of society. The staff members of the Press were all there, I thought. I made a mental note to check with Bobby if anybody was missing. A funeral didn’t seem the right place to take roll. She’d pointed out the board members who’d come, whispering their names to me. I’d recognized Stefenson, of course, and the dean who was a published poet, but had no reason to recognize the rest and hadn’t.
Oh, if Rufus had been here I’d have recognized him. And if he’d sent Victoria in his place I’d have spotted her too. There was a vice provost type who showed up who didn’t look like she really knew why she was there. I guessed that Rufus had sent her in his stead. I was sort of surprised that Rufus hadn’t come himself but I didn’t question it.
