Murder Welcomes You to Buxley Page 3

  “Did he get his name?”

  “He didn’t get anything. We don’t buy our parts from car trunks. My guy sent him packing.”

  He obviously didn’t know anything that could help me. The guy with parts in his car could be something, or he could be nothing. I made a mental note to jot it down, but I didn’t plan to follow up.

  I glanced around the room for Keith. He hadn’t come back in yet. I walked across the garage to the door and pushed it open. The large splat of vomit a few feet away was steaming in the bitter cold. Chunks of Chummy Burgers were visible in the mess. I stepped outside and saw footprints in the snow leading to the alley. My nephew was gone.

  Chapter Two

  I yelled for Keith several times. He didn’t answer. I ran around the building to the parking lot. He wasn’t in the car. I was beginning to panic.

  I ran back inside and told Dick, “He’s gone. He’s not outside anywhere.”

  “I’ll take a look,” he said. “He probably saw something and wandered off. This isn’t a bad neighborhood. I’m sure he’s fine.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Keith knew better than to wander off. I dialed 911. I knew every minute was vital if he had been abducted. I notified the dispatcher of my missing nephew and gave her my location.

  As soon as I hung up, the man came through the back door with Keith. I ran over to them.

  “Where were you? Why didn’t you answer when I yelled?”

  I didn’t mean to snap at him. It was my nerves talking.

  “Mom, I saw Johnny Wyler,” he said excitedly. “I was throwing up, and when I looked up, he drove by real slow. I know it was him. He looked right at me. I yelled his name, and he took off.”

  I frowned. “Are you sure? Could it have been someone who looked like him?” It was way too much of a coincidence that I was looking for Johnny, and Keith just happened to spot him here.

  “I’m positive. He’s been our neighbor for forever. I know what he looks like, Mom.”

  “What kind of car was he driving?”

  “I don’t know. It was black. I ran down the street and around the corner. He had to stop for a car backing out into the alley, and I thought I was going to catch up to him. I didn’t, but I got close enough to get the license plate number.”

  I was impressed. The kid was thinking on his feet. I pretended to hit him upside the head. “Don’t ever do that again. I thought somebody abducted you. I was scared to death. What was the license plate?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t remember. I was saying it over and over again, so I wouldn’t forget, but I only remember the first three numbers now – BR5.

  A few short whoop-whoop sounds from a patrol car sounded as the car pulled into the lot and parked behind mine. An officer stepped out and came into the building.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We found him. I should have called back.”

  The officer eyed all of us suspiciously. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Keith Swenson.”

  “Is this your mother?”

  “No.”

  Dick frowned and said, “He’s been calling her Mom ever since they got here.”

  “I’m his aunt,” I said and handed the officer my card. “He’s giving me a hand. It’s take-your-nephew-to-work day. I’m investigating a stolen car from Patterson Plaza last night. Do you know anything about that?”

  He studied my card. “Jo Ravens. You’re from Buxley. We arrested you over here last July, didn’t we?”

  My eyes went wide. Surely he wasn’t going to bring up the details.

  I needn’t have worried. Keith took care of it for him. “You sure did. You arrested her on the crapper!” He howled with laughter.

  Dick’s eyebrows shot up. I knew he wanted to hear the story. I said two words to Keith to shut him up. “Grandmama’s feet.” It was Pepper’s favorite punishment for him – making him rub his grandma’s feet.

  “All right,” the officer said in an effort to settle Keith down. To me, he asked, “Why did you think the boy was missing?”

  “He ate too much breakfast, got an upset stomach, and went outside to throw up,” I said. “He didn’t come back in right away, and when I went to look for him, he was gone.”

  “Where’d you go?” the officer asked Keith.

  “I saw Johnny Wyler. He’s missing. That’s the other case we’re working on. I chased him down the road.”

  The officer looked to me for an explanation.

  “He’s our neighbor,” I said. “He’s eighteen, and he left home about a week ago. No foul play, but he’s not out of school yet, and his mother has me looking for him. Keith thinks he saw him drive past out back.”

  “I did see him!” he exclaimed. “And I got his license plate number, but I forget it now.”

  The officer seemed to lose interest in us. “Ok, folks. Glad the boy is all right, but you might want to wait a little longer before calling 911 the next time.”

  “What about the stolen car?” I called after him as he walked away.

  “Don’t know anything about any stolen cars,” he called back without turning around.

  “C’mon, Keith,” I said. “Let’s get going. I’ve had enough excitement for one day.” I thanked Dick for his time, and we hurried out.

  We weren’t in the car two minutes before Keith was pulling the last cold burger out of the bag and stuffing it into his mouth.

  “You just threw up. How can you eat another sandwich?”

  “My stomach’s empty now,” he mumbled. “I’m hungry.”

  He finished eating, offered up a loud belch, and pulled his book out of his bag. He began reading, but he wasn’t really reading. I watched him move his finger rapidly across the lines and down the page. He was turning a page every few seconds.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “You can’t possibly be reading that.”

  “I’m sort of reading,” he said. “I saw it on TV. You can pick out a few words on each line and your brain automatically sees some of the others. You can go real fast down the page and know what it was about. It works pretty good. Mom doesn’t know. She thinks I’m reading the old-fashioned way.”

  I swear, this kid was going to be a politician or a salesman one day. He was always trying to cut corners.

  I left him to his skimming and pondered if the morning had been productive. There had been more than one car stolen from the plaza, so it probably wasn’t kids. There could be something bigger going on.

  As for Johnny, I highly doubted Keith had seen him. It made no sense for him to be in Patterson, and the odds of him driving behind the mechanic’s garage while we were there were astronomical. Johnny also didn’t have a car, so if it was him, whose car was he driving?

  “Keith?” I asked, interrupting his reading. “Are you sure you don’t know what kind of car Johnny was driving? It would help if I could run a search on the vehicle type and the partial plate you gave me.”

  “I’m not really into cars. I like big trucks,” he said. “But it might have been like the one that guy you dated drove.”

  “Which guy?”

  “The loud guy.”

  “Edward?”

  “Yeah. I think it was the same as his. I’m pretty sure there was an H on the trunk.”

  Edward drove a Honda Accord. It would be a place to start.

  I dropped Keith off in his driveway and watched until he was safely inside the house. I knew better than to coach him as to what he should tell his mother about our excursion. He was going to embellish the story anyway, and I didn’t have time to defend myself to Pepper. I told him to tell his mother I’d talk to her later.

  I drove to the flea market to check in with Arnie. Arnold Barnaski, Private Investigator. When his offices burned down a few years ago, he set up shop inside Parker’s Tavern for a while, but now he ran his business out of a vendor space in the back corner of the flea market.

  I didn’t have money for four years of college to obtain a criminology degree,
and I wasn’t interested in sitting in classes anyway. The only other way to obtain a private investigator’s license was to mentor under someone for a couple of years. Arnie had agreed to be my mentor.

  My mood was still on the sour side as I parked outside the flea market. Having been awakened by Curt, thinking Keith had been abducted, and knowing I still had to bowl with Mama tonight kept me from expressing anything even remotely resembling a smile.

  I walked in and went right to Roger’s space. Now that he and Mama were dating, she was continually finding things around the house for him to sell. I’d asked her several times to quit giving him sentimental items or things from our childhood, but my requests were always ignored. If I didn’t get over to her house soon and go through closets, the basement, and the attic for my stuff, it would all be gone soon.

  There was a new item on his table today. A beautiful set of dishes had been placed in the center of his main table. I thought they were beautiful when I bought them for Mama for Christmas a few years ago. I couldn’t believe she had given them to him to sell.

  “How much are you selling these for?” I semi-snarled at him.

  “What’s the matter with you? Get up on the wrong side of the bed?”

  Even though Roger looked scary with his heavily tattooed body, and he irritated me quite a bit, he was a relatively nice man and didn’t deserve my bad mood. It wasn’t his fault Mama was supplying him with inventory, but every time I saw something in his space that came from her, it angered me more than the time before. It didn’t help my mood knowing he was naked on Mama’s sofa this morning.

  “As a matter of fact, I did get up on the wrong side of the bed,” I said. “I can’t stop you from accepting things from Mama, but if she gives you something that obviously belonged to Pepper, Hank, or me, would you ask us about it before you sell it. Please?”

  “How am I supposed to know if it belonged to one of you?”

  I picked up a metal fire engine. “Mama gave you this.” He nodded a yes. “Well, did you think it was something she bought for herself? Or did you think it just might belong to Hank?”

  “I’m not giving that back. It’s worth a hundred and twenty dollars.”

  I was done arguing with him. I looked toward the snack counter to see if Arnie was in his usual spot on the end, or if he was asleep in his Barcalounger. He was at the counter.

  An extremely good-looking man turned from the snack counter with a cup of coffee in each hand. I wasn’t one to stop and stare at men, but I made an exception for him. His face was perfect, his hair was purposely disheveled, and his eyes twinkled. The man exuded happiness. His clothing looked expensive and was matched and layered perfectly. His boots were only laced halfway, but even that was exactly right for his look.

  I tried to stop staring as he neared, and I lamely asked Roger, “Have you seen my Aunt Bee today?” The attractive man looked directly at me and smiled a stunning smile as he walked by. He had to be a model.

  Roger frowned. “Bee’s working downtown writing meter tickets. You know that. What’s wrong with you today?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”

  I walked to the snack counter and plopped down on the corner stool next to Arnie.

  “Who was that guy?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” he said in his deep, raspy, smoker’s voice. “He was in here earlier looking around. He had lunch down at the other end of the counter a while ago, and then he left. Figured he was just passing through, and then he came back for coffee.”

  Coffee. I needed more coffee. I called to the man behind the counter. “Walt. A black coffee, please.”

  He set the steaming cup in front of me and said, “I know how you take your coffee, Jo. You don’t have to worry I’ll sneak some cream or sugar in on you.”

  I finally cracked a smile. It was a habit to ask for my coffee black. Now that I was a flea market regular, I should give Walt more credit for knowing what I liked.

  “I picked up a new case this morning,” I said to Arnie.

  He was quick to say, “Curt Hendershot. Stolen car over in Patterson. He called last night. I told him to see you this morning.”

  My jaw dropped. “He was banging on my front door at seven-thirty. Maybe next time you could be more precise and tell a client to call me in the morning.”

  I could see he was amused. He didn’t apologize.

  “I don’t know how to go about finding a stolen car,” I said.

  “What are your first thoughts?” he asked.

  “After talking with Curt this morning, I drove over to Patterson Plaza. The hotel manager told me the parking lot has dark areas, and there have been a few stolen cars since they opened. I talked with the owner of a garage, and he said that other than a guy trying to sell small parts out of the trunk of his car, he hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary.”

  He had a momentary look of being pleased. “Good start. What are you going to do next?”

  “I’m going to look through newspaper archives. I want to see how many stolen car reports there have been in Patterson over the past couple of months.”

  He nodded his approval. “Patterson Plaza could be a fishing hole.”

  “What’s a fishing hole?”

  “A place where the fishing is good, and the fish are cars.”

  I dug for a scrap of paper in my purse and handed it to him. “Will you get your guy to run a search on this? I took Pepper’s kid with me this morning, and he thought he saw Johnny Wyler driving through an alley. He thinks this was the model of the car and the first three digits of the plate.”

  “You know, you could get that boyfriend of yours to run plates for you,” he said.

  “I could, but I’m trying not to involve him in my work. I sometimes ask for advice, but I don’t want to ask for favors. I don’t want him to think I’m using him.”

  The look on his face let me know he understood. “What about Wyler? Do you think the kid really saw him?”

  “He’s known him for years, and he swears it was him. I haven’t had a chance to talk with Johnny’s last girlfriend yet. Every time I call, she’s either in school or working somewhere. I’ll catch up with her soon and see if she can point me in the right direction.”

  He nodded his approval. “I had another cheating husband case come in this morning. It’ll mean following the husband and doing surveillance work. She wants the report before Valentine’s Day next week. Monday by six o’clock to be precise. You want it?”

  “Sure. Who is it?”

  He grabbed a folder from atop the small filing cabinet behind his recliner and handed it to me. “Lisa Graham. Lives over on Highland Drive. Husband is a realtor. She thinks he’s showing more than real estate - maybe with a new chippy in the office.”

  I glanced at the information briefly before saying, “I have to run. I want to get some work done before bowling with Mama and Aunt Bee tonight.

  Arnie smiled a rare smile. He knew I was in for a rough night. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  Chapter Three

  I was mesmerized by Mama’s feet. I couldn’t stop staring at them as she walked up and down the bowling lanes while selling pull tabs from a tip board. With every step she took, a little poof of smoke came out of her shoes.

  Aunt Bee came to stand beside me. “What are you staring at?”

  “Watch Mama’s feet when she walks,” I told her.

  Aunt Bee laughed. “I guess you’ve never seen your mother put baby powder in her bowling shoes. She has enough in each shoe to powder a baby’s butt for a year.”

  Mama came over to us and waved the board in front of my face. “There’s only one pull left. Are you in?”

  I reached into the pocket of my jeans and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. Each of the fifty tabs on the board was supposed to only cost a dollar, but this group of ladies played for one big pot each week – five hundred dollars.

  “Mama, you have powder coming out of your shoes. It’ll get on the lanes. Why
do you use so much?”

  She looked down at her feet. “It’s lucky powder. Since I’ve been using it, we’ve been winning every week. You’ll see. Besides, I like the way it feels between my toes.”

  I sat down in our circle and pulled my shoes out of my bag. I had purchased my own shoes and a ball several years ago when Alan and I bowled in a league. It turned out I was a pretty good bowler. My ball was a pale orange color with white swirls. It reminded me of a creamsicle. I pulled it out of the bag and set it on the ball return rack.

  After a couple of warm up throws, I sat down and waited for the fiasco to begin. Aunt Bee was keeping score this round, so Mama and Rita Johnson sat down beside me to wait for the other team to be ready. I didn’t see Rita very often. She owned a bed and breakfast downtown next to the flea market. I knew it kept her busy.

  Tonight we were bowling The Geriatric Grannies. All four of the ladies were in their seventies. The entire league was comprised of seniors with the exception of The Alley Cats. They were in their forties and fifties.

  Mama was up first. Her shoes poof-poof-poofed on her approach, and she let her ball fly for a strike. She turned around, kicked one leg high in the air, made a fist pump, and yelled, “Booyah!”

  She looked so funny, I couldn’t help laughing along with everyone else. Rita followed Mama with a spare, and Aunt Bee rolled a strike. They were going to be a tough act to follow tonight.

  I threw my ball and watched it head for the pocket and a strike of my own. It overshot its mark, and I ended up with a seven-ten split. Mama’s boos were the loudest. I picked up the ten pin and sat down with a big fat nine to start the game.

  Mama grabbed her bowling bag from under her seat and pulled out her baby powder. She handed it to me and said, “Put this in your shoes. It’s lucky.”

  Sometimes her silliness struck my funny bone, and I could tell it was going to be one of those nights. I declined her powder offer but couldn’t help laughing again.