Dead Broke in Jarrett Creek: A Samuel Craddock Mystery (Samuel Craddock Mysteries) (29 page)

I open my jacket so he can see my gun in the chest holster. I never was much for wearing a gun out in the open, but some show of force seemed appropriate tonight. “I’m here to talk to you about a couple of things. I had a good conversation with Angel this afternoon and I have a clearer understanding of what you and Dellmore were up to.”

Slate laughs. “I don’t know what she told you, but there’s nothing for you to see here. We’re gearing up for renovations so we can get this place going again.”

“Slate, you can’t keep your financial situation secret forever. You’ve got no intention of renovating this place, because you don’t have the money to do it.”

“That’s not true,” Harold chimes in, sounding panicky. “Slate, tell him what you’re going to do.” Harold turns puzzled eyes at Slate, and all of a sudden I realize he’s been kept completely in the dark. He turns back to me. “Slate’s getting the hunting resort going again.”

“Where are the animals?” Dibble says.

Harold looks confused and again turns to Slate. “I thought nobody was supposed to know what happened to the animals.”

“They got sick, didn’t they?” I say, directing my question to Slate. “That variation of foot-and-mouth that ran through a while back. Is that what happened?”

“Look, can we…” He glances toward his brother.

Harold looks wildly between Slate and me and blurts out, “We had to put some of the animals to sleep.”

“And the others?” I ask Slate.

He looks down at the floor. “We had to send them off to a quarantine facility.”

“Cost you a lot of money, I’ll bet. That, along with the water park business going off, you were scrabbling for money.”

“Slate, what is he talking about?” Harold says.

Slate throws his hands out in appeal “We’ve had some problems, it’s true. Like Harold said, we had issues with the animals that had to be resolved. We have a certain length of time before we can bring animals back in, to make sure it’s safe for them. Now why don’t we come over here and sit down and have a drink and I’ll tell you the details.” Dibble and I follow him to the two armchairs, which he indicates we should sit in while he pulls up a stool from the side of the fireplace.

Dibble and I say we don’t need a drink. Slate refills his glass with bourbon. Harold paces around with his arms folded while Slate spins a fine fantasy of his plans to spruce up the resort and then restock the animals. “You’re right. I’ve had some financial setbacks. But nothing I can’t work with. This resort has always been a big moneymaker. Once it gets going again, I’ll be back on my feet.”

I nod as if I believe him. “Is that why you were trying to sell it to Gabe LoPresto?”

McClusky’s leg starts to jiggle. His ever-ready smile is long gone, replaced with a wooden look as if the smile is the only expression he has practiced enough to use freely.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” I say. I see Dibble tense up, ready if there’s a problem. “Gary Dellmore was helping you try to rope LoPresto in. What happened that made you think you’d be better off with him dead?”

Slate looks from me to Dibble, shaking his head. “You’ve got the wrong idea. Not only did I not have any reason to kill Gary, but him being gone has created a lot of problems for me.”

“I thought maybe it was a jealousy thing.”

“Jealousy?” He laughs low and mean. “What do I have to be jealous about? Angel can do what she wants to.”

Harold stares at him. “Angel is nice to me.”

Slate looks down into his drink, lips set in a grim line.

“Slate,” I say, “I wonder if you have a job you might want Harold to take care of.”

Slate looks at his brother for a second and I see him falter. “Yes, let me… uh, Harold, you remember we were going to take some of those animal heads over to Blanco and sell them to that antique place?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I’d like you to carry some of them out to your truck right now. We can take them over to Blanco first thing in the morning.”

“Tonight?” Harold peers at the window. It’s pitch-dark and he sounds fearful.

“I guess you’re right, it’s too dark right now. But why don’t you go get things set up for it? You know, in the spa we’ve got some blankets. I’ll turn on the power out there, and you can turn on the lights and gather up a bunch of blankets so we can wrap up those heads first thing in the morning.”

“I can do that.”

McClusky goes to his foldout bed and brings his brother a flashlight he has beside the bed. As soon as Harold is gone, McClusky says, “I need to go down in the basement and turn on that power.”

“I’ll have to go with you,” I say.

“Suit yourself.”

I follow him down to a big basement that’s stacked with tables and chairs and kitchen implements. He goes straight to a bank of switches, peers at them, and flips a few on. “That should do it.” He turns back to me, and for a second I tense, seeing in his eyes that he’s weighing how to get past me and out the door.

“McClusky, let me ask you something. You’ve got all this furniture stacked in the cabins and down here. What are you doing with it?”

“Auction company is coming next week to take it all off my hands. I’ll get pennies on the dollar. Maybe enough to pay the mortgage here a couple more months. I don’t know what I’m going to do about Harold. It’s going to break his heart.”

I tense, waiting for him to do something to throw me off or get away, but the calculation in his eyes dies when he mentions his brother. Dibble is waiting for us at the top of the stairs, and we return to our seats by the fireplace.

My mind is working furiously. McClusky is right—he’s worse off with Gary Dellmore gone. His source of funding with the bank is gone, and he was counting on Gary’s smooth talk to persuade Darla to rope in Gabe LoPresto. Not that LoPresto would have been roped in anyway, but McClusky doesn’t know that. So he doesn’t have much motive that I can see for killing Dellmore.

But there’s still the fact that McClusky’s gun was used to commit the murder. If neither he nor Angel killed Gary, who else had access to the gun? And then I think about the neighborhood break-ins. Suppose the break-in at Camille Overton’s house was a cover-up to hide the fact that the real target was the McClusky house? What if someone broke in to steal the gun, and the second break-in—the one where the window was broken—was to put it back after it was used to kill Dellmore? There are still details to be ironed out, but if that theory is true, it means someone is framing the McCluskys for Gary Dellmore’s murder.

“Slate, I’m willing for now to go along with you when you say you didn’t kill Dellmore, but you’re not off the hook. I found out you never had any intention of following through with building a water park in Jarrett Creek. You defrauded the town. You had a Ponzi scheme going, getting money from the town so you could put the money into your parks that were already failing.”

“I swear to you, that’s not true. I had every intention of building that park. It’s just…” He stops and stares into the fireplace. “I couldn’t seem to buy a break. Everything went to hell all at the same time. I intended to put the money from the Jarrett Creek loan into a couple of places that were going under. And then once they were back in business, I was going to start the Jarrett Creek one.” He runs his hands through his hair. “And that’s when that damned foot-and-mouth thing happened. What a piece of bad luck! I was already forced to stop having people out here because I didn’t have the money to maintain the resort, but I couldn’t stop taking care of the animals…”

“You were scrambling.”

He stands up suddenly. “Bottom line is, you can’t prove I did anything wrong.”

Dibble and I get up. “It’s not up to me to prove it. That’s what lawyers are for. I think you better get yourself a good one sooner rather than later.”

Gary Dellmore was killed ten days ago, and I’m starting over from the beginning in my investigation. It looks like someone was trying to frame the McCluskys. That means whoever killed Dellmore had something against the McCluskys as well. The McCluskys weren’t just a convenient target—someone went to a lot of trouble to frame them.

Barbara Dellmore fits that scenario better than anyone I can think of. On the way to talk with her, I stop by to see Camille Overton. I’ve been wondering how somebody managed to get into the McClusky house to steal the gun in the first place. I think I know how it was done.

I drive up as Camille is walking out the front door. The wind is whipping up today and clouds are moving in. She’s bundled up and carrying an umbrella.

“Let’s go back inside,” she says, when I tell her I need to talk to her. “I’m already tired of the cold weather and winter’s not even half over.” She shivers. “Now what can I do for you?”

“Do you keep a spare key for the McCluskys?”

“Oh yes, all of us keep each other’s keys in case someone locks themselves out. Mary next door has mine.”

“Where do you keep it?”

“On a pegboard in the utility room. I’ll show you.”

We go through the kitchen into a room with a washer/dryer and utility sink. Jenny and I have the same arrangement, though I keep hers a little better hidden. Putting them in plain sight on a pegboard isn’t much in the way of security.

“My goodness, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not here.” She points to a nail on the board, tagged “Angel.” “I don’t know where it could have gotten to.”

Whoever planned to steal the McClusky’s gun got the spare key from right here—may have even been invited into Camille’s house and seen the key at the time, or even took it then. It could be anybody.

When I drive up to Barbara Dellmore’s house, she’s climbing out of her Toyota. She reaches into the backseat and takes out a sack of groceries, then walks toward me, looking flustered. The slacks and sweater she’s dressed in are a lot more flattering than her gardening clothes. She’s done something to her hair, too, and it looks better.

“Have you made any headway?” Her voice holds a note of belligerence.

“No, I wish I had better news. But I do have a couple more questions.”

“More questions?” She looks annoyed. “I don’t know what more I can tell you, but come on in.”

I take the groceries from her and we go into the kitchen. There’s nowhere to set the groceries down. The counters are covered with dishes, and the cabinet doors are standing open.

“You going somewhere?”

She takes the sack from me, sets it on the kitchen table, and starts putting food into the refrigerator. “I have to sell the house eventually, but right now I’m reorganizing. Ever since Gary died, I can’t stand not to be busy. It’s not a good time of year for gardening, so I have to think of other projects. I woke up at four-thirty this morning and decided to clean out the cabinets and get rid of dishes I don’t use anymore.”

She folds the grocery sacks, looks around, and says, “I was going to offer you coffee, but I don’t think that’s possible. You want a soft drink?”

“No, let’s sit down.”

“I’m going to get some tea anyway. She puts the kettle on. Through all of this I see what she meant when she said she has trouble being still. For the first time it occurs to me that despite the front she puts on, she is grieving her husband’s death.

She sits down with her cup of tea. “What did you want to ask?”

“At the funeral service the other day I got the feeling that you and Cookie Travers were watching for somebody. Do you mind telling me what was going on?”

She blows on her tea and then takes a sip. “I guess it doesn’t make any difference now if I tell you this. Gary was having an affair with Angel Bright. I was afraid she’d try to come to the funeral.”

“What made you think she might show up?”

“I wasn’t really so concerned, but Cookie was worried. She said Angel sometimes came down to the bank, and anybody with eyes could see something was going on between her and Gary. She thought Angel was capable of anything.”

“Gary had told you he was seeing Angel?”

Barbara gets up, rummages around in the cabinets, and comes back with a sugar bowl and spoon. She stirs sugar into her tea and takes another sip. The whole time, she’s been keeping her face averted from me. Now she looks at me head-on, and her eyes are full of pain. “He told me a few days before he died. He said she was hot to get married.”

“Did he ask you for a divorce?”

She looks startled. “No, of course not. The only time he ever admitted an affair was when he was ready to call it quits. He actually told me he thought Angel was acting a little crazy. Too possessive and demanding.”

What must it have been like for this woman to hear again and again that her husband had slept with other women? How could her pride have allowed her to stay with him, time and again? Maybe she really loved him in spite of everything.

“Do you know if Gary ever dated Darla Rodriguez?” I use the word “dated” to try to spare Barbara’s feelings, even though she doesn’t spare herself.

“You mean from the bank?”

“That’s the one.”

“Not that I know of. What gave you that idea?”

“Clara said she thought Darla was after Gary.”

She grimaces. “Clara said that? It must have taken a lot for her to admit that Gary might play around. She wouldn’t have wanted to admit that he was less than a perfect husband to me.” She sets her teacup down. “How would she even know who Darla was? I wonder if she was repeating something Alan said?”