The Five Strangers, page 15
“Yes.”
“And Jack just told you all this? No quid pro quo?”
“What have I got to quid with? Like I said, it was a nasty crime scene, and Jack’s a small-town cop. Sometimes he likes to run things by me because of my background.”
“Rita – what exactly is your background?”
“Law enforcement.”
“Well, that narrows it down,” I said resentfully, knowing that was all I was going to get.
I didn’t remember Rita toasting a bagel for me, but when I groped for my coffee there it was, sitting in front of me on a pretty painted plate. I grabbed the bagel and took a bite, after saying one word: “Jasper.”
“Maybe.”
“No, I don’t mean I think he did it, but I want to talk to him more than ever now. Has Jack got him in custody?”
“Not yet, but it’s not looking good because of the way he’s acting. Just like everyone else in town, Jack knows all about Jasper’s issues with Sheila. The very first thing Jack did was drive over to interview Jasper. He found him strolling around on the beach with his guitar, and he’s refusing to talk.”
“You mean he’s flatly denying he had anything to do with it?”
“I mean he’s not talking at all. You know how stubborn Jasper can be.”
“How did he react when he found out that Sheila had been murdered?”
“Scared. That was Jack’s word.”
“Surprised?”
“Maybe. Jack thinks so, but Jasper wouldn’t say anything, and he’s not cooperating. As soon as he found out why Jack was there, he clammed up.”
“Oh, the old fool! This is not the time to play the crackpot. Maybe we can talk to him, once he settles down. If not, maybe I can get Ed involved. Or Dusty. He seems to trust Dusty. And what about the thing we suspect about Jasper – that he’s hiding somebody at his house?”
“No, I didn’t mention that. We were just guessing. I thought we should check it out first.”
“So Jack may not know that Jasper has a mysterious houseguest?”
“We don’t really know that either, Taylor.”
I got ready to argue but had to put it on hold because the doorbell rang.
“Jack, coming back with more questions,” I said.
“Probably.”
But it wasn’t Jack. It was Dusty July, and he had a few bombshells to drop on us, too. Call it The Sad Story of Sheila’s Life, Part 2, only some of his information was stuff that even Sheila hadn’t known about.
Chapter 26 – Dusty Comes Clean
Dusty took his coffee black and his bagel toasted, and when offered a choice of jelly or peanut butter, he took both. But he looked awfully worried and distracted, and after the first bite he seemed to forget about eating.
Once we had him seated he fingered his growth of beard, gave us a careworn smile, took a sip of coffee and began to speak slowly. When he did talk, I hardly recognized his voice. He sounded as if he’d been throttled.
“Saw your car going by as I was walking down the street,” he told me. “I knew right away where you were going. You needed to talk things over with a friend, didn’t you.”
“I didn’t know that Sheila was dead until I got here and Rita told me,” I said. “I’m so sorry you and Gardner had to see that; it must have been awful. Rita and I were actually planning to have a talk about . . . something else.” He nodded, and didn’t seem curious about it.
Instead, he sat quietly for a while. When he did speak again, he looked like he was in a trance.
“You wouldn’t believe it, seeing me now, but I used to be a pretty boy, back in the day,” he began with a melancholy smile. “And it wasn’t that long ago, either. The ladies were all over me, throwing underwear and hotel keys onto the stage, screaming like little girls. I was honey for the bees. I had some pretty muscles then, too. Used to work out to keep myself looking good. I’d rip the sleeves off my shirts so I could give ‘em a good look at the gun show. I mean, I was ripped. And they loved my pretty face. I never wore a beard, back then. The music business is tough, and you have to use every advantage. God gave me a pretty face, so I kept myself clean-shaven.”
Rita and I exchanged glances, wondering where all this was going. He was still smiling sadly, but his gaze had drifted off until he was looking at something much farther away than the kitchen walls.
“I suppose when you heard me sing that song last night, you figured it out. No? I mean, you asked for the song; you must like it. I bet you’ve heard that recording over and over again.”
Oh boy, I thought as the idea began to dawn on me. But . . . could it really be?
“I’ve only heard the recording one time,” I said. “Are you saying . . . ?”
“I did a good job on it last night, didn’t I? Well, I should have. I’m the one that recorded it. I’m Emerson Fogg, of The Foggy Mountaineers, the pretty-boy frontman who wrote the only hit we ever did have. Not that it did any of us any good – except for that rat, Grady.”
I sat back and took a moment. After doing a double-take, Rita stood up and retrieved her phone from the kitchen counter. Coming back to the table, she searched his real name and pulled up a picture of the band, and there he was, grinning from the center of a small group of hairy guys holding guitars.
If it hadn’t been pointed out to me I wouldn’t have recognized him as Dusty July, beach philosopher and itinerant musician, because since the picture had been taken, he’d let his beard just do its own thing and he’d lost considerable weight. The gun show was over. And his wardrobe, though not exactly formal in the photograph, had gone downhill drastically. But there was no doubt whatsoever that it was him.
And he was right, he’d been real pretty. In the photograph his clothing was decidedly casual, but he was immaculately groomed, smiling enchantingly in a work shirt and boots, with classically sculpted legs in tight blue jeans and rippling muscles running along his bare arms.
“Our glory days. After that,” he began, then he stopped.
We waited silently until he went on.
“After that, I changed. Everything changed. Our follow-up record was a flop. We couldn’t seem to get back on track again. We started having to play back-up again. Then Grady took off and we couldn’t seem to click with a new bass player. Our money was gone. Chrissy was gone. Our big, new management company dumped us. We ended up going our separate ways.”
“And that’s when you hit the road alone?” I asked.
“No. That came later. I had a little house outside of Dallas and that’s about all I had, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave it. I didn’t know how she’d find me again if I just took off looking for solo gigs. Because I always knew Chrissy would come back to me. Grady wasn’t the type to settle down and take care of a woman. Look at what he did to Sheila.”
“Wait,” I said suddenly. “You and Sheila must have known one another. Why didn’t she recognize you when I brought you to her shop and said you were looking for work?”
He tapped Rita’s phone, which had gone into sleep mode and was no longer displaying The Foggy Mountaineers, but we understood. He had changed, drastically.
“Oh, she did, but it took her a few minutes,” he said. “She figured it out while we were still standing there talking together. We hadn’t actually seen one another for years, and we’d both changed a lot in the meantime. I think it was my voice that tipped her off, but it really didn’t take her long to figure out who I was. You were standing right there the whole time, and I bet you couldn’t even tell.”
“She seemed a little surprised, but that’s about all. I figured that was because I was bringing in a stranger instead of Jasper.”
“I knew she wouldn’t say anything. She wasn’t a woman to let anybody have the advantage of her. Sheila was a lady who could keep secrets. She didn’t know why you were calling me Dusty July, but she wasn’t going to give me away. She didn’t even ask me about it later. Me and Sheila – we always got along. And of course, I already knew who she was. I’d been following her around for nearly a year, not that she knew it.”
“Wait,” I said again. “You’d been following her? Why?”
“I figured she was looking for Grady. She’d been trying to find him again ever since he left her, and once she inherited that money from her grandmother, she could afford to hire a detective. He must have been the one that tracked Grady to Tropical Breeze. Once she knew he was here, Sheila moved in and worked on opening that shop. At first I thought it was just a cover story, but I don’t know, maybe she really meant to settle down and run a business here. She was putting enough work into it, and she’d always been interested in that kind of stuff. Antiques. She was always going antiquing wherever we went when we were on the road. Drove Grady crazy, all the junk she’d come back with. Treasures to her; junk to him. But I don’t think she would have come to this town at all if she hadn’t managed to track Grady down, so I’m pretty sure he’s here in the general area, though I’m not sure exactly where. I haven’t laid eyes on him yet.”
“Had Sheila?” I asked.
“Don’t know.”
Rita and I shared a glance but didn’t tell him where we suspected Grady was. Instead, Rita suggested that Dusty was on Grady’s trail because he wanted his money back, too.
He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “I gave up on that a long time ago. I get by on what I make here and there, playing my guitar and doing odd jobs. And everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve found that people are kind.”
“You’ve got charisma,” I told him. “That’s what made you a success on stage – not your pretty face, so much. You’ve let yourself go, but people still like you without knowing why.”
“Seems like it,” he said, as if he didn’t understand it himself. “I never ask anybody for anything; maybe that’s part of the reason.”
“But once you and Sheila were alone, she must have asked you what you were doing here. When I came into the shop the next day, I wanted to take Gardner aside and ask him if he thought you and Sheila were acting like you already knew one another, but I got distracted by a portrait of Sheila’s grandmother and left without talking to him.”
“You already suspected Dusty was Emerson Fogg?” Rita asked me.
“No, I just had a vague idea that he might have been a roadie or something, nothing definite, and certainly not the lead singer.” I turned back to Dusty. “Well, the cat’s out of the bag now, and Sheila is dead. I think it’s about time you gave us some straight answers. Exactly what are you doing here? Why were you following Sheila, and if you weren’t interested in getting your money back, why did you want to find Grady?”
“I was afraid,” he said. “I was afraid she’d kill him. I’m sure that money he took is long gone by now. But like Sheila said, they never got divorced. Last night she said she was looking for a divorce, but I had my doubts. Now that she had a little something to go on with, there was no way she was going to share it with the likes of Grady Grissom, after what he’d done to everybody. And there was only one way to make sure he wouldn’t come after her for a share of her inheritance, once he found out about it.”
“And then he got the better of her, somehow,” I said. “Grady ended up killing Sheila.”
“No,” he said.
We stared at him.
“Who else could it have been?” I demanded.
“Chrissy.”
“But Chrissy’s dead,” Rita said.
“No, she’s not.”
Chapter 27 – Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave
“Chrissy’s not dead?” Rita asked in disbelief. “But Sheila said –”
“Sheila only thought Chrissy was dead because that’s what I told her,” Dusty interrupted. “After her husband took off with my wife, Sheila figured I must be feeling the same way she did. She kept calling me, going on and on about how awful they were, what a bitch, what a bastard, every name she could think of, and I was just so broken up about it I’d hardly say a word. Even when Chrissy came back to me, the calls didn’t stop. Sheila started telling me I had to throw her right out again. I never could make her understand that I wanted Chrissy back. So I just told her Chrissy had cancer, and that’s why I had to let her come back home. It was just a little lie, just something to make Sheila stop badgering me. You met Sheila. I always got along with her, but she wasn’t a woman that was gentle in her ways.”
I thought about Abraham getting shoved off the table and nodded my head, saying, “You always get along with everybody, don’t you, Dusty?”
“I guess.”
I gave him a wry smile. “I don’t think I can get used to calling you Emerson.”
“Oh, I like Dusty just fine. I think it fits me better. At least, it does now.”
“I like it better, too,” I said. Then I waited until he was looking at me. “You know, don’t you, that you couldn’t have predicted where it was all going to lead when you told Sheila that little lie of yours?”
“It was a lie, and a lie is a lie. I was raised better than that. At the time, it was just a way of getting her off my back. And it worked. She was calling me less and less, and after the band broke up we never actually saw one another again. It was a relief, not having to deal with all that anger. But then I began to realize that Chrissy really was sick, just not the way I told Sheila.”
“Sick how?”
“Sick in a way I probably should have known about all along, but could never admit to myself. Maybe that’s why I lied and told Sheila it was cancer. I’d always known something was wrong with Chrissy. The girls never got along, even when the good times were rolling, and I couldn’t betray Chrissy like that. So I lied. I told myself I was being loyal, but I was just taking the easy way out. And now look what’s happened. Chrissy’s out there somewhere alone, I don’t know where, and meanwhile Sheila’s been thinking all this time that I was some kind of a saint.”
“Taking your wife back in after what she did to you was being some kind of a saint,” I told him. “Even if she didn’t have cancer.”
“You said she really was sick, though,” Rita pointed out coolly. “What was wrong with her?”
“She was . . . getting lost. Inside herself. Talking all kinds of crazy. My little Chrissy was disappearing, right before my eyes.”
“What do you mean, disappearing?”
“The real Chrissy was getting lost and somebody else was taking over, and it was happening fast. It’s the real reason Grady dumped her.”
“She went insane?” I asked.
He cringed, and I reflexively apologized.
“Little Chrissy,” he said sorrowfully. “She was such a pretty thing, all bouncy curls and big brown eyes, and about the size of your average 12-year-old. The kind of tiny woman a man just naturally wants to take care of. And as happy as Christmas morning, all the time. Until . . . .”
“Until Grady left her?” I asked tentatively.
He shook his head and lowered it until he was staring straight into his coffee cup.
“She’d always been kind of hard to handle,” he mumbled. “But I knew how to handle her. She was always a little different. The good times were the best ever, but the bad times . . . there were times when I didn’t know what to do with her. I didn’t know what crazy thing she might do, to herself or somebody else. That’s the real reason Grady left her and went into hiding. She wasn’t dying, she was . . . sick in another way.”
“Did you get a professional diagnosis?” Rita asked crisply.
“She wouldn’t go. So I went without her. I saw a doctor and he told me she needed treatment. Intensive treatment, that’s how he put it. Not outpatient. At a facility. I asked for how long and he just looked at me and wouldn’t give a straight answer. Then, when I went back home and told her, she threatened to kill herself. Again. Before I could figure out what to do next, she was gone. Again.”
“Do you think she tried to go back to Grady?”
“Oh, she wanted Grady back, all right, but by then she was obsessed with Sheila. Chrissy had it all twisted around so she blamed everything on Sheila. When people get stuck on an idea,” he began, struggling to make us understand, “they’re capable of believing anything, no matter how irrational it is. She started saying that if it wasn’t for Sheila, she could get Grady back. Because in the end, that was all she really wanted. I guess I wasn’t pretty enough,” he said, raising sad eyes to me. “And behind the image I used to put on with the band, I never was the kind of macho dude that women seem to go for. But I’ve always tried to be a good man. Grady was the macho dude.”
“Macho?” I said acidly.
He shrugged. “More the bad-boy type that Chrissy was looking for, let’s put it that way. She wanted Grady, and she thought if she got Sheila out of the way, she could have him.”
“Did you warn Sheila?” Rita asked.
“I was hoping I wouldn’t need to. I was sure I could find Chrissy before she could do any harm. But the weeks went by and then the months, and in the end, I never did find her. Never even got near her. So I changed tactics and started following Sheila instead, watching for signs that Chrissy was anywhere around. That’s why I’m here in Tropical Breeze. I wanted to protect Sheila, be on the lookout for Chrissy, and make sure neither one of them tried to kill Grady. And you see how it’s all worked out. I made a pretty big mess of things, didn’t I?”
Rita and I shared a look. There was no doubt that the way Dusty handled the situation had been wrong, but he’d never intended for things to end the way they did. His remorse seemed deeply genuine, and now that he was finally able to talk about it, he couldn’t seem to stop.
“It’s all my fault, but I thought things were working out for the best. Once you got me a job working at her shop, I thought I could keep an eye on her.”
“You still should have told her,” Rita said.
“I know. I know that now. But this thing with Chrissy – it’s even more complicated than that. Sheila and I had always been friendly, and I was really happy for her when she got that inheritance. But the last time she called me, she was talking about unfinished business with Grady, and it scared me. She told me she’d hired this detective, and then all of a sudden she moves to Tropical Breeze and opens a shop? I knew it must be because that detective had tracked Grady down.”
