The Tenor Wore Tapshoes (17 page)

"But you're going to be working in Asheville, right?" asked Georgia.

"Yeah. Mostly. Now tell me about this artifac' I'm supposed to be lookin' for."

"Let me get Pete," Noylene said. "He can give you the particulars."

* * *

Pete and D'Artagnan took a booth over in the corner while the rest of us finished commiserating.

"Hey, Nancy," I said. "Before I forget, what do you think about following up on the Lester Gifford case?"

"I thought we'd sort of put that one to bed. Whoever did it is most likely dead by now anyway."

"True. But it's a remarkable case: body that didn't decompose, a seventy-year-old murder in the church. If you could solve it, it'd be worth some state and maybe national recognition in the journals."

Nancy nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah… it would."

"You could hit the law-enforcement convention circuit. Maybe do a couple of forensic papers. Kent said he'd be happy to help you out. Who knows? It might work out really well."

"Yeah. It might."

"Of course, you'd have to solve it."

"Oh, I'll solve it."

"We haven't heard anything for a while," said Georgia. "Can you fill us in?"

"Sure," said Nancy, pulling her pad out of an inside pocket of her black leather jacket.

"You carry that thing with you all the time?" I asked.

"All the time. Here's what I've got.

"Lester Gifford was found in the church on October 6
^th
. He was probably murdered sometime between January 15
^th
and February 8
^th
, 1937. He was thirty-two and worked as an assistant manager at Watauga County Bank. He left a wife, Mavis. No kids that I could find."

"How did you come up with the dates that he might have been killed?" asked Bev.

"He was mentioned in a newspaper article on January 15
^th
. There was a bank merger that happened at the end of February. There was a fire in the records room of St. Barnabas on February 8
^th
. I don't think the fire is a coincidence, but it might be."

"No, I think you're probably right about that," I said. "I'd put his murder closer to the 8
^th
."

"Me too," said Nancy. "So we'll assume he was killed on or around February 8
^th
, 1937."

Everyone nodded their assent.

"Did his wife report him missing?" asked Bev.

"We don't know for sure, but I assume she did. The police records about that sort of thing don't go back that far," said Nancy. "Kent says that Lester was hit in the back of the head by a blunt object. That's what killed him. His body, strangely, didn't decompose in the normal manner. As a result, no one found the body until Billy and his crew dropped the altar and the back popped off."

Nancy turned a page and continued. "Neither Lester nor his wife ever had any connection with St. Barnabas as far as we could tell, but the president of the bank, Harold Lynn, was also the Senior Warden of St. Barnabas. And there was a Sunday School teacher named Jacob Winston who was arrested, but never tried for the murder of Lester Gifford."

"How do you know?" asked Meg.

"The arrest record was in the paper in March. I did another search for Jacob Winston to see if there was any kind of trial. There wasn't. He is mentioned in an article about St. Barnabas and the war effort in 1945, so I've got to assume that nothing ever came of his arrest."

"We still have those papers back at the office," I said. "They're in the folder that we found with Lester's body. Maybe there's something in there."

"You haven't even looked through them?" Georgia asked.

"Rob has," I answered. "It's not a high priority. There's nothing we can do. There's no murderer left. No family we can find. It's a non-case."

"I think you owe it to Lester to find his murderer," said Bev.

"Which is what Nancy plans to do. Right, Nance?" I said.

"Yeah. I'll find out who did it."

"What are they going to do with the body?" Meg asked.

"Kent did an autopsy," I said. "It was the strangest thing. As soon as the body got to the morgue, it started to decompose at a normal rate. So Kent embalmed him and he's lying in the cooler. We can bury him whenever we're ready."

"How about Friday?" said Georgia. "I'm out of town until Friday, but I want to be there. We really should give him a decent burial."

"It's all right with me," I said, looking around the table. The others nodded. "I'll ask George to do the service. Two o'clock okay?"

* * *

Pete came up to the table and sat down with a heavy sigh. D'Artagnan had disappeared from sight.

"Well, he's on the case."

"You're a nice man, Pete," said Meg. "How much did you offer him to find the bun?"

"He wanted a thousand dollar finder's fee."

"And what was your counter offer?" I asked with a laugh.

"Let's just say we settled on fifty."

"Fifty dollars?" said Georgia. "That's not much."

"Plus breakfast for a week while he's looking." Pete shrugged and smiled. "How much can he eat? He's skin and bones."

"Speaking of favors, you owe me, Pete-—" I said.

"Excuse me? I don't think we were speaking of any favors I owe you."

"Be that as it may, remember when I got you out of that speeding ticket in Hickory?"

"Yeah."

"And Asheville? And the one in Lenoir, and that other one in Hendersonville?"

"Yeah." Pete was getting worried. This was a lot of payback.

"I need you to go with me tomorrow."

"Where?" Pete was wary.

"I have to go on this overnight event. And you have to go with me." I looked over at Meg. She was smiling demurely and sipping her coffee.

"And then we're even?"

"As even as we can be."

"Okay," said Pete. "I'll do it. But then we're square."

"We're square," I said.

"Where are we going?"

"The Iron Mike Men's Retreat," I said with a grin.

It's a good thing that the place was almost empty because Pete's cry of anguish would have put most of his patrons off their feed.

Chapter 15

Pete and I threw our stuff into the back of the pick-up late on Monday afternoon. I figured it would take us no more than an hour to find a campsite and get set up before the first activity of the Iron Mike Men's Retreat began. We brought a couple of sleeping bags, a good-sized tent, some snacks, and enough dry wood for a campfire. The stuff at the campsite was bound to be wet, and I wanted to be able to start a fire if we wanted one. Pete was all for bringing a case of beer, but I vetoed it. There was no beer allowed on the premises, and I didn't want to get kicked out before the fulfillment of my wager was complete. Meg had made her stipulations quite clear. And, after all, there was still Seattle to look forward to.

"What do you think of D'Artagnan?" Pete asked.

"I don't know. He's an odd fellow."

"I can tell you this much. I hope he finds that bun before too long. He ate about thirty bucks worth of stuff for breakfast this morning."

"He's thin as a rail. I thought you said he wouldn't eat much."

"Guess he's got a tapeworm or something. I've never seen anyone eat like him."

"What about Haystacks Hornby?" I asked, referring to our local four hundred pound pie-eating champion.

"This guy'd eat Haystacks under the table. I'm not kiddin'. Oh, Haystacks is good—there's no denying that. But D'Artagnan had four plates of eggs down his neck as quick as Noylene could bring them to the table."

"Well, eggs…"

"Plus about fourteen pancakes, a pound of bacon, some country ham, two baskets of biscuits, molasses, grits and about a gallon of orange juice." Pete sighed. "That's just while I was watching. I don't even know what else he ate."

"Wow!"

"Yeah, wow. I told him he had to find that stupid bun within a week, but I don't know if I can afford him that long. He indicated that tomorrow he'd like some waffles."

"Waffles are cheap. Just try to keep him away from the meat," I suggested.

"That's a good plan. I'll try it," said Pete. "Now, tell me again why we're going to get in touch with our inner man."

"Because Meg said so."

"Oh. Right."

* * *

I sat in my office, looking out the window, watching the sun disappear behind the city skyline like a giant orange-yellow yolk being slowly consumed by a determined egg-sucking weasel. I had put out the word for Jimmy Leggs, but I hadn't heard anything. I might never hear anything. Jimmy showed up when he wanted and where he wanted. I was pretty sure that he was the one who capped Candy Blather né Latte Espresso. It was his M.O. The question was, who had hired him?

I needed a suspect and I needed one bad. Toby Taps? Piggy? But who was behind it? I was thinking. Thinking hard. So hard it made my hair hurt. So hard that I didn't hear the voice at the door.

"Excuse me."

I spun around in my chair with my .38 in my hand, leveled it at the squeaky voice and let two shots go, just for meanness, right above his head. He hit the floor like a burlap sack filled with 120 pounds of tuna casserole.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you not to sneak up on a P.I.?" I growled.

"Yes, yes they did. They told me, but I forgot," stammered the mouse in front of me, brushing himself off and getting to his feet. He was a diminutive man--bald, with a mustache that looked like a wooly caterpillar without all those little pink feet.

"Whaddya want?" I was still sounding mean.

"I heard you were looking for a suspect. In the Candy Blather case."

"Maybe. What's it to you?" I waved him into the client chair with the barrel of my roscoe.

"I was her friend."

"Her friend?" I asked, menacingly.

"Well, her boyfriend, actually. Her lover."

"Her lover?" I lowered the gun in astonishment. Candy was about five foot ten. This guy might make it up to her belly-button. If he was wearing lifts.

"I know who did it," he squeaked. "I know who set her up."

* * *

Pete and I turned into the Baptist Conference Center at about 4:30. There were cardboard signs directing us past the main building and down a dirt road toward the campground. We drove up and pulled in behind several cars that had already arrived.

"Y'all are going to want to go on and pick out a campsite," said a genial man clad in hunting fatigues as he came up to my open window. "Just head down this road until you find one that's not taken. You guys already registered?" He lifted his clipboard up to the window.

"I believe we are," I said. "Hayden Konig and Peter Moss. We're here to get in touch with our inner men."

"Yep. Here you are." He checked us off his list. "All squared away. Y'all go get yourselves a site. Pitch your tent if you want. We won't get started till it gets dark."

"Great," I said. "We can't wait."

* * *

The beauty of a pop-up tent is that you can pitch it in about a minute and a half. It takes slightly longer to take down, but not much. What took us the most time was filling our air mattresses from the electric pump that I had plugged into the cigarette lighter.

"This isn't too bad," said Pete as he tried out his mattress. "Remember that time in college when we went squirrel hunting? Three days in the rain, sleeping bags lying soaked on the ground and nothing to eat but that one mangy squirrel that wandered up to the campfire."