Whom Dog Hath Joined (29 page)

“I sent the crime scene guys. Not sure if they found
anything, but I’ll check on it.”

“I also talked to a professor at Eastern about concussions,”
I said. “I’ll tell you what she said when I see you.”

I kept getting program ideas that I wanted to put down, even
as I knew I needed to close up and hurry to Stewart’s Crossing.  I settled for
using my phone as a voice recorder as I drove, which confused Rochester, who
kept turning to look at me each time I started talking.

Despite my delaying, I got to The Chocolate Ear first and
staked out a table on the sidewalk. I left Rochester there and went inside to
order, and by the time I returned with iced coffee for Rick and myself, and a
biscuit for Rochester, Rick was there with my dog.

“Tell me what Bobeaux told you,” he said, as I sat down.

I repeated it all.

“That’s the same story he gave me,” Rick said. “I’m not sure
I believe him, but there doesn’t seem to be any other choice.”

“The details tie in with what we already knew,” I said.
“That he and Don arrived by bus, that he met Brannigan the next morning alone.
You’re sure he didn’t take the money from Don?”

“If he did, he’s a hell of an inventive liar,” Rick said. “If
he had an extra grand back in 1969, he could have lived just fine until school
started in the fall and he wouldn’t have had to clean toilets, pick weeds or
any of the other crap jobs he told me were the only ones he could get.”

“How about fingerprints?” I asked. “Did you ever check on
those?”

“Yeah. The crime scene guys lifted dozens of different
prints from the inside of that room, which is consistent with the story that a
number of teenagers moved through there. Most of them couldn’t be matched to
anyone in the IAFIS system.”

I knew from past experience that was the master fingerprint
database maintained by the FBI. “How about Bobeaux’s prints?”

“Yeah, we matched them to ones from inside the room. And I
got an officer in Zelienople to go out to Arnold’s house and open up a box of
Don’s stuff. Managed to get some decent prints there, and used them to
eliminate a bunch of the unidentified ones.”

He shook his head. “I don’t get how Don Lamprey could go to
sleep and not wake up. Where’d the bang on his head come from?”

 “Bobeaux says that Don went out somewhere, and that when he
came back he complained of a headache. Suppose he fell, or got hit, while he
was out, and had pressure building up in his brain that didn’t affect him right
away.” I told Rick what Jackie Conrad had said, about Talk and Die syndrome.

“That part makes sense,” Rick said. “Say Don found the
hippies and got high with them, then when he was walking in the woods in the
dark, he tripped and hit his head.”

I nodded. The neurons were firing in my brain, fast and
furious, and I remembered my thoughts after I spoke with Jackie. “That could
make him disoriented enough to drop the cash and whatever dope he had let. But
he was able to get back to the Meeting House and climb into the hidey-hole.”

“I’m liking this theory,” Rick said. “If we wipe out Dr.
Bobeaux as a suspect, then what we have is a death that wasn’t a murder, which
is the end of my investigation. That will make the chief happy, and the mayor,
too.”

“But hold up a sec,” I said. “There’s also the chance that
it might not have been an accident. Remember, the money is still missing. Bob Freehl
 told me that hippies used to camp in those woods, and that you could smell the
dope from Main Street. Suppose Don smelled the smoke, and went looking for
those hippies, hoping to sell them the dope he took from his brothers.”

“And someone robbed him?” Rick asked. “I’d have to ask Bob
if there were any reports of violence out there in the woods, or if it was just
some happy love hippie thing.”

“Bob said that the cops arrested those hippies a few times
but could never make the charges stick. Would you guys still have those
records? Maybe there’s someone you could talk to.”

“Like I told you before, that stuff hasn’t been digitized,”
he said. “Boxes of paper and rolls of microfilm, in the file room at the back
of the station. But maybe it’s time I dug in.”

“Want me to help?”

He shook his head. “Not with police files. Though I
appreciate the offer.” He stood up holding his iced coffee. “I’d better get
back to the station. I’ll call Bob, and then head to the records room. I’ve got
a long night ahead of me.”

Rick petted Rochester once more, then started back to the
station. As I watched him go, I saw a tiny Fiat pull up down the block, and the
guy who emerged from the front seat had a scruffy beard with a couple of dreads
in it. He wore huarache sandals, knee-length shorts, and a T-shirt that read
“Code. Ship. Repeat.” Over his shoulder he carried a woven  Mexican bag in
bright red and yellow.

He reminded me of so many of the guys I’d worked with in
Silicon Valley. Would I have turned out like him if I hadn’t met and married
Mary, who had tried to mold me into the kind of husband she wanted?

I doubted it. I’d been raised in the decades between the old
hippie and the new hippie movements. I remembered the occasional tie-dyed T-shirt
from my childhood, but the 1980s were the Reagan years, a conservative reaction
to the looser sixties and seventies.

The clock had turned again, and what was old was now new.
Eastern students and graduates were wearing tie-dyed T-shirts and granny glasses
and dropping out of the rat race just like their predecessors had forty years
before.

Rochester was nosing a copy of the Stewart’s Crossing
Boat-Gazette
,
our local weekly newspaper, that had fallen to the ground beneath my table, and
I picked it up and started to read while I waited for Mark Figueroa to arrive.

The front-page headline was “Friends Renovation Stalled.”
Because the Meeting House had become a crime scene, rehab work had been halted
temporarily. That recess allowed the critics of the project to complain again.

Were there other secrets hidden in that building? It was a
couple of hundred years old, after all. And Quakers were human beings, so it
was possible that all kinds of stuff could have gone on in the past, which
someone didn’t want dredged up.

The article quoted Eben Hosford, which surprised me, because
he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was easy to get hold of. He wanted the Meeting
dissolved, or merged with the one in Yardley or Lahaska. The building should be
razed, and the site sold to real estate developers. I couldn’t see Hannah
Palmer or her sister or any of the other Quakers I’d met going along with that.

One of the disadvantages of small-town life is that we only
have a weekly paper, rather than a daily, and thus our local news is often
stale before it even arrives. I was sure that the fate of the Meeting House
would take a long time to resolve, and that the
Boat-Gazette
would
always be a few days behind. No wonder college students had a reputation for
disdaining print media. The “real” story was more likely to be found in
someone’s Twitter feed, in Facebook posts or Pinterest images. They were more
up-to-date, at least.

By the time Mark arrived, it was early evening and still
quite warm. He went inside and got an iced tea, then joined me and Rochester
outside.

“I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch, but I don’t want to
work with Joey,” Mark said. “He says that I have a low self-image, and that’s
why I’ve been dating jerks. And then he had the balls to tell me that he
thought the carpeting I picked out was ugly.”

“So which one pissed you off more?” I asked.
“His criticizing your taste in men, or in carpet?”

Mark glared at me, but then he had to laugh.
“The carpet. I have damned good taste when it comes to design.”

“I have to say I never liked the combination
of green and brown,” I said. “It reminded me too much of what comes out of
Rochester when he’s sick.”

“This is really the limit,” Mark said, in mock
anger. “Now even a straight guy is criticizing my taste.” He sighed. “I guess
you have a point. It was a drab combination.”

“But you could do better, right?” I asked.
“You can show Joey Capodilupo that you do have good taste by finding a carpet
that’ll knock his socks off.”

“Speaking of which, have you seen his feet?
They’re enormous.”

“TMI,” I said, holding up my hands.

Suddenly, Rochester jumped to his feet and
started barking. “What’s up with you, dog?” I asked, grabbing his collar. I
looked up and saw Eben Hosford approaching.

“Can you hold him for a minute?” I asked Mark.
“I know that Rick wants to talk to that guy.”

I shoved Rochester toward him, still barking,
and Mark leaned down to him and spoke directly into his ear. “Excuse me, dog?
Can I help you with something?”

I pulled my phone out and texted Rick.
eben
h @ gails
. Rochester stopped barking long enough to lick Mark’s face.

Mark said, “Eww,” and recoiled as Eben
approached us.

 “Ornery beast,” Eben said as he passed, his open
shoulder bag sagging with soap and candles. “You watch out I don’t shoot him
sometime.”

I held my tongue, not wanting to scare the old
man off before Rick arrived. But I felt in my messenger bag for my dad’s gun, just
in case. And I hoped Rick had kept his cell phone handy during his records
search.

Eben went inside, and through the big windows
I saw him showing some candles and soap to Gail. I sent her a mental message to
take her time looking at the merchandise, giving Rick a chance to get there.
But all circuits must have been busy, because instead I saw her shaking her
head, and Eben began to pack up his wares.

As I looked at Hosford, my brain began to
assemble all the information I knew about him. He was an old hippie, who had
been around Stewart’s Crossing in the sixties. He probably smoked dope and
might have been part of the group that hung out in the woods behind the Meeting
House.

He hadn’t been a Quaker back then, but he had
joined the Meeting soon after. Why? Because he knew what had happened to Don
Lamprey and wanted to protect the evidence? Was he the one who had sabotaged
the Meeting House heater so that no one would smell the decaying body?

And biggest question of all, could Hosford be
Don’s killer? I saw him finish packing up and head for the front door. Rick was
still nowhere in sight.

I had to stall Hosford. When he walked out the
door, I called, “Hey, Eben.”

He looked over at me, and Rochester growled. I
petted the dog and said, “You were around Stewart’s Crossing in the sixties,
weren’t you?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Did you hang around behind the Meeting House
back then, smoking dope?”

“What I do or did is no concern of yours. You
keep your nose out of my affairs.”

“You probably weren’t surprised when Rochester
found that sneaker in the false wall at the Meeting House,” I said. “You knew
that boy, didn’t you?”

“He was alive the last time I saw him!”

He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled
out a short-barreled shotgun. He pointed it at me and said, “I told you, stay
out of my business. Or you’ll have a 12-gauge Mossberg in your face.”

36 – Jailhouse Lawyer

I wrapped my free hand around the grip of my
dad’s gun, keeping it inside the messenger bag. Could I get the gun out, and
get in a shot at Eben Hosford before he shot me? I remembered what Rick had
said when we were at the shooting range together. Aim for body mass.

Shouldn’t be too hard, with the man six feet
away from me. But I was no kind of quick draw. I’d probably fumble the gun out
of my bag, screw around too long with the safety, and end up with a bullet in
my brain.

“Put the gun down, Mr. Hosford.”

I turned and looked behind me. Rick was a few
hundred yards away, approaching us carefully. He had his hand on the holster of
his gun, still attached to his belt.

“I didn’t kill him!” Hosford said, waving the shotgun.
It looked like an old model, but still very threatening and effective. “He came
around our campfire, looking to sell his dope, but none of us had any cash. He
cursed us out and walked away. I got up and followed him through the woods.”

My heart was beating like crazy, and Rochester
growled and strained to go after Eben. I held onto the dog’s collar with all my
strength. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mark Figueroa grasping the edge of
the table, his eyes wide with fright.

Rick kept walking calmly toward us, keeping his
hand on his gun in his holster. I was sure that a shoot-out on Main Street was
the last thing he wanted. Cars moved past us quickly, oblivious to the drama
taking place on the sidewalk. I was scared that one of them would blow a horn
and startle Eben into shooting.

“Dumb ass came snooping around us in the
woods, trying to sell some dope he said was excellent,” Eben said defiantly. “But
none of us knew him so we shooed him away. He could have been a narc for all we
knew.”

He cocked the shotgun and my heart raced. With
my left hand I gripped Rochester’s collar; with my right I ease the gun upward,
doing my best to keep one eye on Eben and one on Rochester. I’d seen the way
the dog reacted when he thought I was in danger. This time, though, I was going
to be the one to protect him.

“I was curious, so I followed him through the
woods. Dumb ass didn’t even have a flashlight, walked into the branch of a big
old tree. Knocked him out.”