Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 03 - When the Carny Comes to Town (19 page)

She didn’t look up.  “One of the guests gave me some special flour for his muffins for tomorrow.  He’s allergic to gluten.”  Her tone was cool, but not totally unfriendly.

“How long is Mr. Hardy staying?”

“Marcus is going back on Tuesday or Wednesday,” she said.

Marcus.  She never calls her guests by their first names.

“How’s his book coming?”

At this she did look up.  “I don’t know.  The way he chit chats and goes to Java Jolt I can’t imagine he has a lot of time to write.”

“Does he strike you as a bit…odd?” I asked.

“Odd, how?” she asked, frowning.

“I don’t know.  I just found him on my floor wandering around.  He was by Penny’s room.”

“I’m not sure I like your nomenclature,” she said, dryly.

Nomenclature?
  Sometimes I forget Aunt Madge was an art history major with an English minor.  “Yeah, me either.”  I sat next to her.  “He said he guessed he was on the wrong floor.”

She thought for a moment.  “That is about where his room is on the third floor.  And he does seem kind of fickle sometimes.”  She shrugged.  “Aren’t all writers a bid odd?”

“I guess.  Makes me want to lock my door.”

“You should in the summer.”  She went back to her recipe book.

I stood.  “I’m going to the library.  You have anything that needs to go back?”

She looked up for a second.  “I don’t think so.”

“I’m getting some books for Scoobie.”

At that her fact brightened.  “I’m so glad.  He said just yesterday he wasn’t reading much because the pain medicines make it hard to concentrate.”

Nuts.  Caught in a lie I didn’t even have to tell.

DAPHNE SAID SCOOBIE had been reading a lot of Agatha Christie novels just before he was hurt.  “Agatha Christie?  That doesn’t sound like Scoobie,” I said.

“He reads anything, but, personally, I think he’s trying to figure out what makes you tick.”  She shrugged at me.

“I can’t even do that.”  I started toward the mystery section.  “Can you tell me what he’s read?”

“Only if he says I can.”

I looked back toward her.  “Privacy,” she said, and turned toward a child who wanted to check out a book.

“Rats,” I mumbled.  I’d just have to guess.  I picked out two that were near the end of a listing of her books, rationalizing that he would have started with her early ones and worked forward.  Then I went to the racks that had the last month’s newspapers.  It made sense to me that Penny had been pilfering while she was in Ocean Alley.  I hoped I would see a crime with her initials on it.

The crime report is usually on the second page of each day’s Ocean Alley Press.  There’s no Sunday paper, so Monday’s is a long list, especially in the summer.  I went to the Saturday of the carnival weekend.  There were several DUIs, one public indecency arrest, and two car break-ins.  Not too bad for a weekend.  I looked at the break-in locations, noting they were nowhere near the carnival.

Monday was a different story.  In addition to the usual post-weekend number of DUIs, three people had reported “items stolen from person,” which I figured meant pick pocketing.  Two were “location unknown” and one said only “church parking lot.”  I thought for a moment.  The unknown locations likely meant someone noticed the theft but didn’t know when it occurred.  There were no names with the listings.

“That’s no help,” I muttered to myself.  There were two more indecency arrests (you can always tell when the weather’s warm) and there had been a fistfight outside the Sandpiper on Sunday.  That wouldn’t be Penny, she was passed out at the Cozy Corner. 

Since I didn’t know much about where Penny was after her last appearance at the hospital, I checked Tuesday through Thursday.  Nothing looked relevant.  I looked at Friday, which had the very short note about Penny’s death.  At the top of that page was a two-paragraph article about the Landon family arriving home after several days’ absence to find “a number of items missing from their home.”  Among them were a set of all of the state quarters, an “unknown amount of cash,” and the “family silver service.”  Someone had gained entry by making a slit in the screened porch and then going in the unlocked door that led from the screened porch into the house. 

Why didn’t Morehouse say anything about that after he saw the silverware in Penny’s bag?  Because he would consider it none of your business.

I usually thought of “silver service” to be a tea service, but I’m hardly an Emily Post kind of gal.  It could be silverware.  My instinct said “an unknown amount of cash” didn’t necessarily mean the amount Penny appeared to have in her small suitcase, though I didn’t know exactly how much she had.

My mind wandered.  On Friday, Scoobie saw Turk and told him to stay away from local kids.  Turk was mad and maybe beat up Scoobie, and maybe Penny found her son.  Penny left her stash at Aunt Madge’s, surely planning to return.  Then someone killed her.  Was it someone who knew she had called an ambulance for Scoobie?  Someone who wanted her stash?  Then I remembered the nurse said that Scoobie’s head injury probably was inflicted not long before he was found.  How did that fit in?

My cell phone chirped and I jumped.  “Hello?”

“Why are you whispering?” George asked.

“I’m in the library.”

“Meet me at Newhart’s.”  He hung up.

I fumed as I gathered my books. 
Who does he think he is, ordering me to meet him at Newhart’s?

GEORGE HAD TWO MILKSHAKES sitting in front of him and was almost bouncing in his chair.  “Bow to the master,” he said, as I sat.

“In your dreams.  What?  What did you find out?”

He pushed the chocolate shake toward me and opened his thin notebook.  There was a list of items.  “The Friday of the carnival weekend Penny pawned a laptop, two solid silver picture frames, a very old men’s pocket watch, a bunch of Hank Aaron baseball cards, and two smaller flat-screen TVs.”

“Didn’t the pawnshop owner wonder where she got all that?” I asked.

“If she had taken it to one place, maybe, but she went to all three shops.”

“So…she came into town with all that?”

“My guess would be that she steals stuff one place and pawns it in another.”

I nodded.  “Makes sense.”  I paused.  “She might have stolen some silverware while she was here.”

“Why do you say that?” George asked.

“Short article in the paper the Friday after the carnival.  Family had been away and found some things taken when they returned.”

“That’s right, the Landons.  I saw that.”

“I figured you wrote it,” I said.

“Nope.  Newbies do the police blotter and stuff like that.”

“So, she steals stuff and pawns it.  Wait!  Maybe that’s why she was wearing better clothes the day I saw her at the Budget Inn.”

“Yeah, makes sense,” George said, slowly.  “I don’t know what we gain by knowing that.”

“Doesn’t matter.  It gives me a reason why she might have had money for better clothes.” 

“Oh yeah, ‘cause if you have a reason everything’s okay.”  He said this with a sarcastic look.

“Cut it out.”  I drank more of my milkshake.  “So, we don’t know if she still sells on line.”  I paused.  “Nuts, even if she pawned stuff and sold it other ways, it doesn’t sound like a lot of money, nothing like how much was in her little suitcase.”

“I thought you didn’t know the amount,” he said, suspicious.

I shrugged.  “I don’t.  Just looked like a lot.”  I shrugged.  “Maybe some was from selling stuff she stole and some was in one of the houses she broke into.”

He slurped his milkshake and then sat back in his chair.  “Maybe she was working with someone.”

“And they were dumb enough to let her hold the money?” I asked.

“Yeah, they’d have to be pretty dumb,” he agreed.

“Did you ever find out what happened to the two people she was arrested with in New York?”

“They haven’t been arrested again, that I could find out, anyway.”  He flipped back a few pages in his notebook.  “Guy got out of the county jail after his thirty days and wasn’t on any kind of parole.  Girl was on probation, but her time was up more than a couple years ago.”

We stared at our respective milkshakes.  “I made Morehouse play the 9-1-1 call about Scoobie.  I think it could have been Penny.”

“You’re kidding.  He would never do that for me.”

I shrugged.  “Maybe he has different rules for reporters.”

“And…?” he said.

“I thought it sounded like it could be her, making her voice really low.”

“What would make her even look for him?” George asked.

I shrugged.  “Maybe she followed Turk?”

“Followed from where?” George said.

“The Sandpiper,” we said, together.

“My favorite joint,” said Lester Argrow.

I looked up at him.  “I thought you liked Burger King.”

Lester motioned that I should move over and he slid into the booth next to me.  “I knew you was gonna do some detecting about Scoobie.  You shoulda called me.”

From the look on his face, George was about to lose his milkshake.

“We’re just talking,” I said.  “Kind of odd that Scoobie gets hurt and then his mother gets killed.”

“Scoobie getting’ hurt, yeah, but I woulda off’d that broad if I coulda gotten away with it.  I had to watch out for her every time I went to Burger King to meet clients.”

George grinned.  “I forgot you use Burger King for your office.”

“Saves me makin’ coffee in the office.  Course I gotta buy them theirs.”  He frowned.  “I was goin’ to Java Jolt for awhile, but the coffee’s a lot higher.”

“What do you mean watch out?” I asked.

“If it was the end of the month she always wanted to ‘borrow’ a couple bucks,” he said.   He got a food server’s eye and mimed drinking coffee.

I remembered George saying Penny used to sit on the curb outside the Sandpiper.  “Hey, Lester.”  I pushed my milkshake away and turned to face him.  “Your building is kind of catty-corner to the Sandpiper, right?”

“Yeah, which is why I gotta walk by it to get to Burger King, brainchild.”

George’s eyes lit up.  “Brainchild?”

“Do you have cameras?  Security cameras, I mean?” I asked.

“Couple, yeah.  Mostly just to scare people off…”

“Do they show the Sandpiper entrance?” George asked, catching on.

“Sure, somebody gonna piss on the sidewalk near the steps up to my office or throw up in the planter on the ground floor they’re probably coming from Sandpiper,” Lester said.

I almost asked why he was concerned about that, but I didn’t really care.  “How long do you keep your tapes?”

“I don’t keep any,” Lester said.

My heart sank.

“But the company monitors them keeps them for a few weeks, then reuses them.  Why?”

LESTER ARGUED WITH THE security firm for ten minutes.  They were not going to go through the tapes to find the ones from two weekends ago, not on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend. 

“How about for a hundred bucks?” he finally said.

When whoever he was talking to didn’t seem to respond immediately I knew we were going to get to see those tapes.

WE COULD SEE THEM, BUT ONLY IF WE WENT through them ourselves.  Sitting between Lester and George was kind of like being squashed on the New York subway on a hot day.  Plus, they were crabby, each wanting to be the alpha male of security tape screening.

George had expected an organized box of videotapes so we could watch in some order, but the security firm box said only “Argrow, May” on the side.  “I can’t believe they don’t put dates on these,” George fumed. 

I couldn’t either, but I kept my mouth shut and put another VHS tape into the player.  After the fourth tape, I said, “You know, Lester, if you get a security firm that uses digital recordings they could label the files more easily and keep them on a computer indefinitely.”

“So I could watch people barf on the curb over and over?” he asked.

Charming.
  “Good point,” I said.

Penny was on the seventh tape we fast forwarded through.  Thankfully she had on the same leotards she’d worn to the hospital that first Sunday Scoobie was in there, so she wasn’t hard to spot. 

“Okay,” George said.  “She’s in, now we have to see when she goes out.”

“You learn that kind of thinkin’ in college?” Lester asked.

“And we need to see who walks out before her,” I said, before George could respond. 

We were still fast-forwarding, but more slowly.  After about ten minutes I’d guess maybe an hour of time had passed on the tape.  Turk and two other men walked out of the Sandpiper, and Turk pointed in the direction of Burger King.  For Lester’s benefit, I said, “Scoobie said that Turk saw him and called that Scoobie should join him for a drink.”

“Scoobie don’t drink no more,” Lester said.