Murder of a Snake in the Grass, page 8
Thea grinned. “I’ll tell you exactly where to find him.”
Skye saw her chance to sit and chat in a nice cool office slipping away. “He’s not here?”
“No, he’s at the park. The Crazy Craft races start at noon, and he’s the judge.”
“Crazy Craft, what’s that?”
“It’s a little hard to describe.” Thea scratched her head and wrinkled her nose. “A bunch of people who are an egg short of a full carton ride anything that floats down the river. Whoever crosses the finish line first with most of their boat still intact wins.”
“So, why is Wally wasting his time judging something like that?”
“Well, the thing is, the other time we tried this race, during Chokeberry Days last year, there were some differences of opinion as to who won. A bunch of drunks started pushing and shoving each other, and a few ended up in the river. A couple nearabouts drowned. Wally’s hoping that if he judges the thing, that won’t happen this time.”
“I suppose cancelling the race is out of the question.”
Thea looked at Skye with a puzzled expression. “But everyone had so much fun last time.”
“Of course, how silly of me.” Skye smiled and patted the dispatcher’s hand. “You said Wally was in the park. Do you know where exactly?”
“Sure, he’s at the boat launch just past the bandstand.”
Skye started to leave but stopped. “Near where the body was found?”
The dispatcher nodded.
“But the evidence. People will be trampling all over that area.”
“Oh, Wally had the crime-scene technicians from the sheriff’s office out there early this morning. They released the area about an hour ago, except for the bandstand and about fifty feet around it, and they taped that off.”
“Did they find anything?”
“I haven’t heard,” Thea said.
“Do you know if they talked to the carnival workers yet?”
“Yep, Wally and our officers were up all night interviewing that crew. Not that they found anything out from them. They all alibi each other.” The phone started ringing, and Thea turned to answer it.
Skye waved and mouthed thank you as she backed out of the room.
Although Skye had had the Bel Air for five months, she still had trouble reversing the huge vehicle. She maneuvered back and forth, trying to avoid the light pole directly behind her, and finally freed the car from its parking spot. As she drove away from the police station, she noted all the food and craft tents set up shoulder to shoulder along Maryland Street. What a difference from last night. People and cars were everywhere now.
The booths stopped abruptly just before the bridge at the Up A Lazy River Motor Court. Both the motor court and the Brown Bag Liquor Store’s lots were being used for public parking, as no cars were being allowed inside the park.
Skye pulled the Bel Air into an empty spot near the Dumpster in back. It was normally not a good place, but no garbage truck would be coming through today.
A teenager hurried up to her as she got out of the car. “Lady, you can’t park there.”
“It’s okay, I’m Charlie’s goddaughter.”
The boy looked skeptical. “Sure.”
There was no sign of Charlie. How could she convince this kid? She unzipped her fanny pack and pulled out her wallet. After a short search, she found what she wanted, a picture of Charlie and her hugging. She handed it over.
He inspected it and handed it back. “Okay, I guess. I better not get into trouble over this.”
“It’ll be fine, I promise.” She reached into her wallet to tip the boy but found the bill compartment empty. Shoot! She had forgotten to stop by the bank, and it closed at one. She’d better hurry. She found four quarters in the change compartment and handed them over. “Sorry. I need to go to the bank.”
The teenager shrugged and walked away.
Skye cut diagonally across the parking lot to the south-west tip and took the wooden footbridge over to the park. It was already thronged with people.
Although the carnival wouldn’t open until dusk, there was plenty for people to do during the day. The odor from the Lions Club’s pony ride and the Junior Chamber of Commerce’s petting farm hung in the humid air. A mini golf course, set up by the Elks, had players lined up three-deep. But the biggest crowd was at the Grand Union of the Mighty Bull’s bingo tent. It seemed that no matter what the other organizations did, the GUMBs managed to do it a little better. The rivalry among the groups was legendary.
Skye waved to family and friends almost continuously as she made her way down the length of the park peninsula toward the tip. It seemed that almost everyone in Scumble River was partaking of the bicentennial events.
According to her watch, it was close to noon when she finally reached the boat docks. She could see Wally sitting on a lawn chair under an awning. A table to his right held a plate and a plastic cup. Several women hovered at his elbow, poised to offer refills.
Skye had heard that Wally’s official period of mourning for his divorce had been declared over by the single ladies of Scumble River and that he had been receiving a lot of attention since then, but this was the first time she had witnessed the women in action. She felt an odd twinge of jealousy but pushed it down.
This summer, while working with Simon on the church’s youth group, Skye had decided that a relationship with Wally was not an option. Simon was much more her type, and her attraction to Wally was purely physical. Besides, now was hardly the time to think of another man, not when she had both Luc and Simon pursuing her.
That settled in her mind, she climbed down the roughly hewn stairs cut into the soil. The rocky shore was hard to walk on in sandals, and it took her a few minutes to make her way past the people gathered at the water’s edge. Most stood with their hands shading their eyes, peering down the river. The race must be starting soon.
As she approached the chief, who was looking more and more like a sheik with his harem, she took a deep breath, determined to keep this conversation businesslike.
She reached the edge of his awning and said, “Hi, got a minute?”
Wally jumped up, nearly trampling one of his supplicants, who had been ready to pop some tasty morsel into his mouth. “Hey, Skye, what are you doing here?” He narrowed his eyes. “Thought you’d be busy showing your fiancé around.”
“He is not my fiancé. How many times do I have to explain the concept of ex to you?”
“Oh, I understand the ex concept all too well.” A momentary look of misery crossed his features.
Dang! How could she have forgotten his ex-wife, Darleen? “Sorry.” Why did being around him make her IQ drop twenty points? “Um, anyway. I need to talk to you about something urgent.”
“The race is starting, and I really have to pay attention to that. Can it wait a little while?”
“I guess.” Skye turned to go. “I’ll go to the bank and come back.”
Wally took her arm. Her skin tingled where he touched her. He looked down and said, “Why don’t you stay and watch the race with me. You could have something to eat. Some of the ladies made lunch.” He seemed unaware of the dirty looks the “ladies” were throwing him.
Skye’s first inclination was to decline, but when a platinum blonde glared at her, she found herself agreeing to stay. Strangely enough, none of the women offered her any food. She and the chief walked to the water’s edge.
He took his walkie-talkie from his belt and said into it, “Roy, start the race.” He explained to Skye that Officer Quirk was upstream with the participants.
They watched as the first entry came bobbing into sight in the distance. From where they stood, the vessel looked no bigger than a Matchbox toy. It was quickly followed by other crafts.
Skye turned from the river and said, “It looked as if you were having a great time with all those ladies fussing over you.”
“Aw, that wasn’t anything.”
“I just wondered, because I heard you were dating Abby Fleming.”
“We went out a couple of times, but it turns out that both of us were really interested in someone else.”
“Oh.” Skye stopped. She really didn’t want to go down that road.
Wally opened his mouth, but a yell from the river distracted him. Both he and Skye looked toward the sound. The Crazy Crafts were rounding the bend. As they neared, and Skye got a better look at them, she was amazed by the variety and ingenuity of the boats. There was one made entirely of milk cartons and one made of water jugs. Another enterprising sailor had strapped Styrofoam coolers to a lawn chair. There were plastic rafts, inner tubes strung together, and homemade canoes made out of hollowed trees.
But the clear winner, at least for creativity, was the Marshmallow Man. Some guy had attached inflated white trash bags to every inch of his body. He looked like a cross between bubble wrap and an unmade bed. It really was too bad that twigs and outcroppings were popping his bags faster than he could float toward the finish line.
The homemade canoe was declared the winner, and Wally turned his attention back to Skye. “What were we talking about?”
“I don’t remember,” she lied. “Let’s get back to why I came looking for you.”
“Sure.”
She asked, “Anything new on the murder?” If he had already figured out who the killer was, she wouldn’t have to tell him about the graffiti matching Grady’s test drawings.
Wally took her hand. “Let me see.” He used her fingers as markers. “One, the Montreal police can’t locate any next of kin for Gabriel Scumble. They’ll search his penthouse and get back to me. Two, there was no wallet or identification in his room at the motor court. Three, his car seems to have disappeared. And, four, there are a ton of fingerprints on the weapon. Seems as if everyone on the committee held that pickax at one time or another. They’ve all admitted to handling it.”
“Great. Only in Scumble River would a pickax be that popular.” Skye reluctantly freed her hand from the warmth of his. “Did you hear about the fight between Gabriel Scumble and Fayanne at the Beer Garden last night?”
“Yep, she claims he tried to leave without paying for his drink, but no one can corroborate her story.”
“Did you talk to Earl and Glenda Doozier? I heard they were there at the time.”
“They said they didn’t see or hear a thing.”
Skye nodded. She knew the Dooziers would never talk to the police, but they might talk to her. Maybe she’d pay them a visit and see if their story agreed with Fayanne’s … No. What was she thinking? She had just told Trixie she wasn’t investigating this murder. There really was no reason for her to get involved beyond sharing what she heard from Frannie and Justin with Wally. Besides she had enough to worry about with Luc in town. Still it was an interesting puzzle.
“Take a walk with me,” she said. “It’s easier to show you rather than try and explain.”
“A walk in the park with a pretty woman sounds like a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.” The warmth of his smile echoed in his voice.
She tried to ignore the attractive wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and started toward the steps. “Follow me.”
“To the ends of the earth.” He hurried to catch up with her as she strode across the grass.
Skye rolled her eyes but was secretly flattered by his compliments. It was hard to believe this was the same guy who had been so mad at her a few months ago that he’d actually arrested her. Since then they’d both admitted their wrongdoing, apologized, and agreed to forget and forgive. Still, she wondered at his good mood.
As they approached the yellow tape surrounding the bandstand, Skye stopped. “Can we go past this? I want to show you something on the inside.”
“Sure, just don’t touch anything.”
Once they reached the steps, she pointed. “Okay, see that graffiti on the wall to the left? The one in the metallic orange-red paint.”
Wally squinted and twisted his head. “The one that looks a little like two pointy-sided rectangles bisecting each other?”
“Yes, that’s the one.” Skye took out a folded paper from her fanny pack. It was a photocopy of Grady’s visual-motor test. She had gone over to the high school and made a copy before heading to the police station. “See how it looks exactly like this one here?”
The chief carefully compared the figure on the paper and the one on the wall. “Yes, I see. Whose paper is this?”
“I’m planning on telling you, but I need to do it my way, okay?”
“Okay.”
She took another folded piece of paper from her pack, this one light green. “Look at this.” She pointed to the left square of three.
He studied the one she had indicated. “It looks kind of like the other two, but the points are in the opposite direction, the number of sides of the rectangles are different, and the amount the two cut into each other is less.”
“The figure on the green paper is the model that is given to people to copy from. It’s called Wertheimer’s Hexagons. The white paper is a photocopy of a student’s attempt to reproduce that shape. And as you can see, the form on the bandstand wall is the exact duplicate of the student’s drawing.”
“Go on.”
“This morning I went to talk to Justin Boward and Frannie Ryan. I wanted to make sure they were all right after their experiences last night. They told me they hadn’t told us the whole truth. Turns out this bandstand is the occasional hangout of a gang of boys that Justin and Frannie are trying to write a story about.”
“Write a story? Why?”
Skye explained about the kids wanting to start a school newspaper, and how they had been tailing this gang of boys. She concluded with “Anyway, it looks as if Justin and Frannie were at the bandstand both before and after the murder was committed. Justin swears that the graffiti wasn’t there before but was after.”
Wally was silent for a moment, then took out a small notebook and started writing. Several pages later he said, “So, who is our spray-painter?”
“Although testing is usually confidential, kids are told before we start that if they tell me something that makes me think they’re going to hurt themselves or others, I will have to tell someone. I called the school psych ethics chair this morning to ask about this, as it is a little outside of that warning. She couldn’t give me a clear yes or no answer, so I’m counting on your treating this information as classified, unless it leads to the murderer. Do you agree?”
“You mean I can’t arrest the little jerk for some lesser offense this might lead me to?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s asking a lot.”
“I know, but my ethics mean a lot to me.”
“This is what I can agree to. I won’t use this information to arrest the kid for something small, but if it’s a felony, I may have no choice.”
“You’re making it impossible for me to tell you.”
“Think about it, Skye. This information could lead to our connecting some kid to rape or assault or any number of crimes where people were grievously injured. I can’t turn a blind eye to that. My ethics mean a lot to me too.”
“I’m trusting you, Walter Boyd.” Skye took a deep breath and said, “His name is Grady Nelson. He’s a sophomore. His aunt is the secretary at the junior high.”
Wally wrote down what she said and tucked his notebook back in his shirt pocket. He put an arm around Skye and hugged her. “You did the right thing.”
She sagged against him for a moment and prayed that was true, but already she felt guilty.
CHAPTER 9
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Skye left Wally at the bandstand and walked over to Charlie’s bungalow, which, along with the motor court’s office, occupied a small building located in the middle of the parking lot. The other cabins formed a horseshoe around the perimeter. The architecture was strictly 1950s Route 66 style: gray and white fake brick siding, a flat roof, and room for one car in front of each of the twelve units’ white doors.
When Charlie didn’t answer her knock, she went around the corner to his office. A hand-lettered sign on a piece of lined yellow paper had been stuck to the door with duct tape. It read: “No Vacancy. Office closed. If checking out, put key in mailbox.”
Since everyone was required to pay for their room when they registered, self-checkout wasn’t uncommon. But where was Uncle Charlie? It wasn’t like Skye’s godfather to remain silent and out of sight when something big was happening in Scumble River. She had been half expecting a phone call or a visit from him since the body was discovered.
Skye was torn. It was quarter to one, and if she didn’t leave immediately, the bank would close before she got there. She had twenty-three cents to her name, and as far as she knew, the only ATM was still broken. Some moron had tried to rob it last weekend by chaining it to his pickup. The machine had moved approximately a half inch from the wall. The pickup had lost its axle.
She scrawled a hasty note to Charlie, saying she’d see him the next day, and shoved it under the office door, then ran to her car. The Bel Air’s interior was nearly the temperature of the planet Venus, but there was no time to wait for it to cool off. Gritting her teeth, she got in and felt her thighs scream as they came in contact with the blistering leather. The steering wheel was worse. She searched the glove compartment. Her options were slim: a hairbrush, a flashlight, and a Kotex Maxi Pad. The latter, folded lengthwise, slipped over the steering wheel like it was made for it. She just hoped no one noticed what type of protection she was using.
The bank was only a mile or so away. Normally this would be a two-minute drive, but the roads were packed with cars and people. She inched down Basin Street and lucked out when a pickup pulled out of a parking spot right in front of the bank. It was a minute to one when she pushed open the double glass doors, but there was no one in sight. The bank’s interior looked like the scene of an alien abduction—everything intact but the humans missing.
Skye waited. What if they wouldn’t give her any money because it was past closing time? She tried coughing, jingling her keys, and tapping the pen on the counter. Finally, she called out, “Yoo hoo, anybody here?”
