4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4 (6 page)

Chapter 10

Sam toyed with the food on her plate. She didn’t eat much ever, and tonight, not at all. Karl, oblivious of her silence and lack of appetite, attacked his crêpes as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. In truth, Sam did not care for French cuisine, real, or the genre offered at
Chez François
, Picketsville’s “other restaurant.” Most of the townspeople ate at the Crossroads Diner, if they ate out at a restaurant. Fast food, out on the highway, had replaced most of the townsfolk’s culinary needs beyond the Crossroads. The nearest alternative eateries were north to Lexington or south to Roanoke.
Le Chateau
, a pricy tax write-off for a local orthodontist, did serve excellent food in a location up in the mountains, but it was not well known nor often frequented by anyone from the town.

The faculty from the college rarely, if ever, patronized the diner, could not find or afford
Le Chateau,
and contented themselves with trips north or south. They considered it to be one of many sacrifices they made in their efforts to bring a measure of culture to the area. The townspeople, for their part, thought the college folks were jerks. Too stupid to realize what an easy berth they had compared to, say, farmers, mechanics, over the road truckers or, indeed, anyone who actually worked for a living.

The owner of
Chez François
believed his restaurant would eventually provide a meeting place, a neutral ground, if you will, where these two disparate peoples could break bread together, meet and mingle. He envisioned a melding of cultures, and something like a new enlightenment emerging. But bad cuisine is bad cuisine, irrespective of whatever higher calling one may have, and the townspeople were not about to pay four times the minimum hourly wage for rubbery baked chicken even if it was called “cocoa van
.
”

Karl paused and looked up.“What’s up with you, Sam?”

“Up? Nothing’s up with me.”

Did she sound short? She didn’t mean to. She forked through the greenish tangle on her plate. The menu had called it
épinard
en
crème
and that sounded good. It wasn’t. Spinach, creamed or otherwise, never rated very high on her vegetable hit parade. She felt cheated. She grew up in a part of the country where meals consisted of meat, broiled, boiled, or roasted, and starches, always boiled. Green things were a dietary obligation usually ignored. She put her fork down and planned dessert.
Chez François
might be a bust at anything except roast beef, but M. Francois did do desserts.

“You look, like, faraway or something.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. It’s just…I really don’t like spinach…and, um…when is your hearing?”

The hearing was, in fact, what was
up
with Sam. For the last three and a half months, Karl had been on temporary assignment in Picketsville. She feared he might be just a temporary assignment to her as well. And that could change soon. If the board cleared him, he might be heading back to DC. That would mean, at best, a return to the commuter relationship they’d had before the big blow-up with his boss. That would be a step backward. And he might be transferred to almost anywhere, and that seemed more likely, given the circumstances.

“I should know in a week or so,” he said, and sipped his wine. The label featured a frog and the words Jeremiah. “Nice wine.”

The room seemed warm, close. She could almost smell fermented grapes. Wine made her sneeze and she was afraid she would do so at any moment.

“Is going back so important?”

He looked at her. A deep V formed between his eyes.

“Sam, all I’ve ever wanted was the FBI. Other kids in my neighborhood were heading to the carwash or jail, but not me. I worked. I studied. I hoped I would find a way. The lucky ones, like me, who could play a sport, got their ticket out of the neighborhood.”

“You played basketball at college, I know, but…”

“It was my ticket out. There were kids in my neighborhood who were better than me, you know? They could sink a three pointer from outside the line with their eyes closed, but they stayed back.”

“If they were that good…”

“Good at b-ball. Not good at life. They couldn’t get past all the stuff out there, petty crime, and gangs. I could have been part of it, you know. It was there—the drugs, the scams, the players, and the easy money.”

“But not you.”

“No, not me. If you have a record, most coaches won’t recruit you. I say most. There are still some real felons in schools, here and there, but coaches won’t take a chance any more. Too many ‘spoiled athlete’ stories in the news. Too many brushes with the law, rapes, robberies, bribes, DUI, you know. But, like I said, FBI is all I ever wanted.” He mopped a crust of bread through the dark sauce on his plate and bit off an end.

“Those guys I played ball with? They went to class only often enough to get by, to stay eligible. They spent their time on the hardboards shooting, passing, dribbling, and more shooting, getting ready to be drafted by the NBA. Some of them were at the university for six or seven years. As long as they had some eligibility left, they stayed and played, hoping some NBA scout would catch their act, so to speak. I was in the books, not shooting threes, shooting for A’s. FBI is tough. They don’t take dummies in the Bureau.”

“No, of course not. Were you drafted?”

“Me? No, no way. I was in class or in the library, not working on my hook shot, not shooting one hundred foul shots a day. No, I played just well enough to stay on the team, ride the bench, to keep the scholarship.”

“If you had gone with those other guys and practiced what then?”

“Who knows? I might have made it. Might have been picked in the late rounds and then…there was this guy, Ducky, from my old neighborhood and he—”

“Ducky?”

“Yeah, he walked funny, waddled, so we called Duck, Ducky. Well, he was a couple of years ahead of me and he was drafted in a late round. His agent worked a deal for him and all of a sudden, Ducky is a millionaire. Or so he thinks. He goes out and buys a pimped out Beemer, two carat diamond ear studs, and girls. He played for five years in the NBA for four different teams. He was good, but not quite good enough, see. There are thousands of kids who can shoot and play and who are hungry. One percent will make it to the NBA and stay there. One percent. You have to be better than all of the hungry kids who show up every summer and try to take your job away. Ducky had too much, too soon. You don’t come out of the south side with ten cents in your pocket and a pair of one hundred dollar basketball shoes you got ‘from a friend’ and then land a million or two, guaranteed, and not screw up somewhere along the way. If you can recover and fend off the hungry kids, you’ll be okay. But Ducky…”

“He couldn’t?”

“Out on his rear end, owed child support to three different women, and had a thousand dollar a day coke habit.”

“But the money?”

“Gone. No play, no pay. He’s doing time in Joliet.”

The conversation had drifted away from where Sam had hoped it would go. Karl pushed his plate away and signaled the waiter.

“I’d like dessert,” she said. She couldn’t be sure if he would be asking for the check and she wasn’t finished.

“Oh? Well, sure.” The waiter brought them dessert menus.

“So, if Ike asked you to stay on as a deputy sheriff, to take Whaite Billingsley’s place, would you do it?” Whaite Billingsley, Ike’s former second in command, had been run off the road by an idiot in a snow storm. A good man, a fair, hard-working cop, gone but not forgotten. His slot had not yet been filled.

“Well, he hasn’t asked and he won’t.”

“Won’t? Why?”

“Sam, you are a sweet thing. But you come from another world, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at me, Sam. What do you see?”

“I see a man who is good and loyal…”

“And black.”

“You’re not…well, I mean…”

Karl smiled. “I know what you mean, Honey. You’re wonderfully color blind, though there are days when I wonder if I was really black, instead of what…beige…? Whether you’d ever have looked at me twice.”

“I would have.”

“Yeah, I think you would. But everybody else in this town don’t see it the same way. We are south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Sam. Folks around here are still not quite past Brown vs. the Board of Education.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You see that old couple get up and leave when we walked in?”

“No. Well, maybe they were finished.”

“I don’t think they had even ordered, and then there are the notes I get with the mail.”

“What notes? I don’t remember any notes.”

“That’s because I intercept them. They’re not nice. They want me to know that some of the good people in the town do not approve of you and me, and they intend to save you, a nice white girl, from this black devil.”

“That’s what they say?”

“That’s the nice version. See, even if Ike were foolish enough to offer, what kind of life would I have as a black sheriff? You should have seen that guy, Lydell. He about called me boy. When Ike said I would be leading the investigation, he near fainted on the spot.”

Sam’s heart fell. She had never even considered the possibility that he wouldn’t stay if the circumstances were right. She had planned to urge Ike to keep Karl and thought the only obstacle would be his FBI career. Now, all that seemed far away. She pinched her nose to stop the sneeze and spooned her flan.

Chapter 11

Essie Falco blew on her cup of morning coffee. While she faced her computer screen and radio paraphernalia, she kept Karl Hedrick in the corner of her eye. She didn’t trust him. She couldn’t say why, exactly. It wasn’t because he was a black man, she was pretty sure of that. After all, Charlie Picket had been in the sheriff’s office since before Ike even, and she didn’t have trouble with him. Of course, when Ike took over, he gave Charlie a full duty assignment. Before then, Charlie had been assigned to the south end of town which was where most of the African-American families lived, at least until lately. Some of the older folks didn’t cotton to Charlie’s being in their part of town now-a-days, especially out in Bolton, where that murder took place. Now that was something interesting, considering…The radio on her desk crackled, which distracted her momentarily, and when she finished talking to the deputy who’d called in, he was gone.

She heard his laughter in the hallway. He must have found an excuse to wander over to Sam’s space. Now, that was another thing. She liked Samantha Ryder…Sam, even though she stood, like, over six feet tall and had them green eyes and red hair. She could’ve played basketball for Ireland or something. And that Karl was even taller. He could probably have played for the Harlem Globe Trotters. Theirs was not a match Essie cared for, or folks in the town approved of, though most of them wouldn’t come right out and say so. But there you are. It’s a whole new world, and Ike said she’d better get used to it, so she guessed she should. Anybody but Ike saying that, and she’d probably take a walk. But Ike…well, you couldn’t say no to him, even if he was, like, Jewish and all. And Ike liked Karl, so that was that. She shook her head. No, she thought, it’s not Karl’s being colored that mattered—well not much—it’s that he’s FBI, and the office got nothing but grief from that quarter. She wondered what Karl did that got him a suspension from the Bureau, and then a phony assignment to Picketsville.

“Hey, Mr. FBI guy,” she yelled, “you working that shooting up in Bolton?”

“What?”

“Get your rear end out here, and leave Sam alone, or I’ll tell Ike you’ve been smoochin’ on company time. What I asked was, are you working on the mess out at the old Lydell place.”

Karl reappeared. “I am. You got something for me?”

“Maybe. There’s a story that I heard, when I was growing up, about Lydell’s place.”

“A story?”

“I think there was a murder out there in that house, back in the Civil War day, same as this one.”

“What do you mean,
same as this one
?”

“The dead guy was, like, locked up, wasn’t he? That’s what Billy’s brother told Billy.”

“Yeah. A locked room murder. So?”

“Well, that’s the way it got done before, I think. You could look that up and you’d have a solution right then and there.”

“Sam,” Karl shouted, “Google locked room mystery, Picketsville, Virginia.”

***

Betsy Blessing’s husband described her shop as her hobby job. She resented the notion that she wasn’t serious about her store, but had to admit that business needed to pick up, and soon. She barely made enough to cover her expenses, never took any money home. The IRS would have something to say about another Schedule C, declaring another loss, if she didn’t get something going. She needed to show a profit. The bell over the door clanked a welcome and she looked up to see Ike pushing through the door, his new clock under his arm.

“I hope you’re here to buy a whole suite of furniture to go with that clock. You are, aren’t you?”

“Why would you think that?” He moved a stack of gilt edged books aside and set the clock down on a fragile Hepplewhite chair.

“Well, talk around town is you and the brainy Dr. Harris will be setting up housekeeping soon and knowing, as I do, how you live, I expect you’d need a house full of furniture. I doubt Dr. Harris would put up with the Goodwill rejects you have in your apartment.”

“Goodwill rejects? I happen to think retro décor is very with it. I may be a trend setter, even.”

“Really? You think? Well then, I have a friend who has an ’85 Yugo for sale. I’ll have him give you a call.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I have enough trouble being inconspicuous in a police car.”

“No furniture?”

“No. I need a different key for the clock. This one doesn’t fit.”

She opened the case and tried the key, with the same results Ike had the previous night. She retrieved a box from under the counter and rummaged through a pound of clock keys.

Ike’s eyebrows raised a bit, “Where’d you get all those?” he asked.

“I’ve been collecting old hardware for years. Even before I had this shop, I had a little business matching keys, locks, hinges and so forth. I made some money at that.”

“I’ll tell Jonathan Lydell. He’s restoring that old place of his and could use some help in that department, I imagine.”

“No need, but thank you, anyway. Jonathan is a regular.”

“He buys clock keys?”

“Clock, door, all kinds. You name it. The last time he came in, he wanted a key for an old travel trunk he had in his basement or attic, I don’t remember which. And I wouldn’t call Bellmore ‘that old place,’ at least not within his hearing. It’s an historic building, and in the register as such, and he insists everyone know that.”

“I read the plaque on the wall, sorry, you’re right, but relics of the past, animate or inanimate, are not a passion of mine.”

“What do you call all those old movies you collect, if not relics of the past?”

“They are classics. Bogart, Cagney, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamar are not relics, they are treasures.”

“Right-oh, and if you plan to stick with your lady love, you may have to change your tune about houses and history. She is an historian, after all. Here…” Betsy fitted a device into the clock and gave it a series of turns.

“That doesn’t look like a key.”

“It’s a winder.” She held up the crank-like device. “See, it has a square hole in the end that fits over the winding stem. It’s like a key that way, only with this little crank handle you can wind it more quickly, and with less strain on your fingers when it gets tight.”

“I’ve seen one of those before…speak of the devil…Lydell had one like that mixed up in a box of rusty keys in his basement. Only it was bigger.”

“Probably used to wind a cabinet clock, a grandfather clock. He owns at least three. Did I tell you, he wanted me to furnish some of the rooms in Bellmore?”

“That would be a nice sale.”

“Oh, no, he wasn’t planning on paying for the furniture. He wanted me to place pieces in the rooms, as advertising. He said I could leave my business card on the pieces and if anyone wanted to buy it, they could contact me.”

“Very generous of him. I’m guessing here, but I bet he wanted a piece of the sale, too.”

“You guess right. Okay, your clock is wound and I’ve set the striker. If you need to reset it, you see this wire thingy in back of the works? Well, you push it up and count out the strikes to match the hour you have set.”

“I got it.”

“Good. My best to the lovely Ms. Harris. When are the two of you coming to dinner?”

“You need to talk to her. She’s the one with the unmanageable schedule and time problems.”

“You know, when most of this furniture was made, people lived at a more leisurely pace, and still had time to hold balls, give parties, and fight a bloody civil war.”

“You’re planning on throwing a ball, or starting a war?”

“It’s an idea. Not the war part. We could do a costume thing. Women in hoop skirts, men in antebellum dress suits. All
Gone With the Wind
, or something.”

“And the folks serving the punch?”

“Oh, yeah, can’t go there anymore, I guess. Well, it was a thought. Maybe we should do the roaring twenties. Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
, all that jazz. Better?”

“Better. Well,
tempus fugit
.”

“And also with you.”

“What?”

“Sorry, inside church joke. Ask the Reverend Blake Fisher.”

She watched, as Ike laid the clock carefully in the trunk of his car next to the riot gear, a collection of crumpled paper coffee cups, and a change of clothes she guessed he must keep handy for those days when things really went south.