No Answers

 

“So much for playing sleuth,” I said bitterly. “Peter Gerard tried and look what happened. I don’t intend to be next. You can go ahead and make like Sherlock Holmes - or Miss Marple if you want to - but I’m not. This stupid partnership is dissolved.”

I even thought I meant it.

Mac regarded the body. “The problem with Peter is that he did not take the game seriously enough. He came here to meet a man claiming to have information - the classic ruse of a killer - and yet he came unarmed.”

“So you’re saying he should have brought a gun, like Max Cutter?”

“I did.” Mac pulled up his sweatshirt to reveal a firearm stuck in the belt of his pants. “A Colt .32.”

“Where the hell’d you get that thing?”

“Stop shrieking, Jefferson. I bought it. It is quite legal - I have a concealed carry permit. Now call Quandra Hall at the Winfield.”

“Why?”

“To see if she answers. Do you realize how much of what we know about the events leading up to this death comes only from her unsupported word? Perhaps there was no mysterious caller offering information about the first murder.”

And maybe the beard on that letter carrier was a phony, disguising the face of a woman.

I called Quandra’s hotel room, letting the phone ring a full two minutes.

No answer.

I called Oscar on his cell phone to tell him about Gerard’s demise. This made me feel quite virtuous, by the way, considering that the last time I was involved in finding a dead body I phoned it in anonymously from Erin’s last remaining pay phone.

“You found what?” Oscar screamed. I quickly filled in a few basic details. “Stay right there,” he said. “And don’t call Teal. If you call Teal, I will be very, very unhappy.”

And if I don’t call her, she’ll be unhappy. What a choice.

“Don’t you believe in freedom of the press, Oscar?”

“Not especially. But what Teal prints isn’t the issue right now. I don’t want her hanging around the murder scene when my people are trying to collect evidence. And I’m telling you, Jeff, if she shows up this time it’s going to be your ass.”

He hung up.

“I guess you heard that,” I told Mac.

“Indeed I did - every stentorian word. Oscar’s mellow mood from earlier in the day has certainly evaporated. Perhaps his demand is just as well. Lynda is an excellent journalist. She might ask some questions that would be uncomfortable for us, especially me.”

“There is that,” I conceded. “So do I risk infuriating Oscar and putting ourselves in a deeper hole than we’re already in or do I risk getting Lynda pissed at me just when it looks like our relationship might be getting less complicated?”

Without waiting for an answer to that rhetorical question, I called Lynda’s cell phone. When voicemail kicked in, I hung up. Have you ever noticed that cell phones make you reachable around-the-clock, even when you don’t want to be, but somehow they don’t help you get a hold of other people when you most need them?

“You could have left a message,” Mac said.

“By the time she got it, it probably wouldn’t matter. I’ll try again later.” Where the hell is she? What’s the she doing with her Android turned off or out of reach?

Oscar, deflected from what was to have been a night of drinking beer and watching college football on ESPN, showed up with his cops in fifteen minutes. He wore a University of Dayton Flyers cap and a sour expression.

“You birds are developing a nasty habit of showing up in the close proximity of dead bodies,” he said, looking down at the latest.

Mac ignored the implied criticism - or was it something approaching an accusation? I still wasn’t sure whether Oscar meant something serious with the theories he had offered on the river, or whether he had just been playing head games with my brother-in-law. “Does this tragedy convince you that Peter Gerard was indeed the intended victim all along?” Mac asked Oscar.

“Not yet,” the lawman said. “I don’t intend to jump to any conclusions. The murderer might want me to do just that. Now, take it from the top. What were you doing following Gerard, anyway?”

“Quandra Hall, Gerard’s assistant, asked us to,” I said. “She was worried about him, afraid something might happen to him.” I let my voice show the irritation I felt. “That’s understandable, isn’t it? I mean, in view of what happened before - and since?”

“Yeah, I guess she had reason to be worried, all right. But why call you clowns instead of the police?”

“Nothing personal, I am quite sure,” Mac said. “Of course, you should ask Ms. Hall that question. I rather imagine that she felt as though she knew us, could trust us, and would find sympathetic ears in these quarters. The police, on the other hand, were an unknown quantity to her and might be inclined to dismiss her fears.”

“Well, she sure made the right choice,” Oscar said acidly. “Gerard might have gotten hurt otherwise.”

“Sarcasm is the last refuge of the witless, Oscar,” Mac retorted with some heat. He reached into his acre of sweatshirt to pull a cigar from the pocket of the shirt beneath. The motion caused a tug on the sweatshirt, raising it a fraction of an inch above the hip where Mac’s Colt .32 was nestled. It was legal and hadn’t been fired. Still, if Oscar saw that -

“Hold it!” the chief called.

Mac froze.

“You’re not going to light that cigar in here,” Oscar said. “Might disturb the evidence. Now, back to your story. You followed Gerard here, you saw him come into this building and not come out. Did he have any connection with this building that you know of?”

“I don’t see how he could,” I said. “He’d never been in this town until the day before yesterday.”

“That could be long enough. Do you know anybody else connected with this building - especially anybody from the college or somehow messed up in this case?”

“No,” I said, “not that I know of.” Mac slowly shook his head.

“Okay,” Oscar said. “The name on mailbox is Susan Gramke. We’ll find out where she fits in sooner or later. Now, both of you were watching the building the whole time, right?”

Mac nodded. I hesitated.

“What is it, Jeff? You don’t seem any too sure.”

“Well, I was on the phone for a few minutes. I’m not sure I was paying the closest attention to the building then.”

Oscar didn’t ask me who was on the other end of the call, and I didn’t see any reason to bring up that fiasco - my brilliant idea that bombed. I must have been talking to Hoffer right about the time Gerard was having his brains blown out, or maybe a few minutes later.

“Look, Oscar,” I said, “it’s not like there’s any great mystery about who did this. I mean, Mac and I both saw what appeared to be a mailman leaving the scene of the crime. Obviously, he was the killer. He must have had the gun, presumably equipped with a sound suppressor, hidden in his mail pouch.”

Oscar removed his UD Flyers cap and scratched his head. “This is a bit too whodunit-like for my simple taste. If this mailman was a phony, where did he get the uniform?”

“An excellent question, and by no means unanswerable,” Mac said. “I suggest your officers make the rounds of all the costume shops within a radius of several towns to see if anyone has rented such a uniform. Remember, however, that we paid scant attention at first to this letter carrier who was some yards away from us. That is the genius of the disguise. G.K. Chesterton wrote a classic mystery story based on the notion that a postman is essentially an invisible man.”

“Is there a point in there somewhere?” Oscar said.

“We did not look closely, and we may have seen what we expected to see. A shirt and pants of the appropriate color probably would have been good enough to fool us, doltish amateurs that we are.”

But I could tell by the quirky look he gave me that Mac was thinking of another possibility that already had occurred to me, one that we couldn’t offer Oscar: that the uniform was the real thing.

Lem Carpenter worked for the Postal Service.

If you can’t think of a reason Carpenter would want to kill Peter Gerard, join the club. I couldn’t either. But when a fact like that slaps you in the face, you don’t just turn the other cheek.

“Are you two finished with this exercise in mental gymnastics yet?” I asked. “I’d like to seek some creature comforts and get the taste of death out of my mouth, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Oh, we’re finished here,” Oscar growled. “Now we’re going downtown so you can make an official statement and sign it.”

He made us follow him to the police station. It was two hours after that, well past eight o’clock, before we were breathing the slightly cool evening air.

“That was a most tedious process,” Mac commented. “I have never enjoyed police procedurals.”

I didn’t even wait until after we had left the historic City Hall to whip out my phone and start making calls.

I called Quandra Hall again.

I called Lem Carpenter.

I called Lynda again.

No answers.