Софи Келли - A Tale Оf Two Kitties

• • •

By five forty-five the next morning I was on my way over to Fern’s Diner. Burtis’s shiny black truck was in the parking lot behind the squat, brown-shingled building. I found Burtis inside perched on a stool with his elbows on the counter and his hands wrapped around a heavy china coffee mug. He was wearing a blue plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled back over a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and his Twins ball cap was sitting on the counter at his elbow.

Burtis Chapman was a massive man, with wide shoulders and a barrel chest, intimidating if you didn’t know him. His face was lined and weathered and the little bit of hair he had left was snow white. He was good friends with Marcus’s father, Elliot Gordon. In fact, the two of them had gotten more than a little intoxicated just a few weeks ago when Elliot had been in town. They’d hijacked the jazz trio playing in the bar at the St. James Hotel and sung Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” The other bar patrons seemed to enjoy the impromptu concert; hotel management, not so much, and I’d had to go rescue them before the police were called.

Burtis looked up and smiled when I stepped into the diner. “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” he said. He slid off his stool and gave me a hug.

“Feel like some company for breakfast?” I asked, shrugging out of my jacket.

“You, girl? Always.”

He patted the empty stool beside his, then took my jacket and hung it on a nearby hook.

Peggy Sue came out of the kitchen and slid an oversized oval plate in front of Burtis. “Hey, Kathleen,” she said with a smile. “What can I get you besides a cup of coffee?” She was wearing her regular uniform of red pedal pushers and a short-sleeved white shirt with Peggy Sue stitched over the left breast pocket. Her red-framed glasses had been replaced with a black cat’s-eye style a lot like Susan’s pair. Her hair was in a bouffant updo with sidewept bangs, lacquered in place I was guessing with half a can of hair spray.

I pointed at Burtis’s plate. “That looks good to me.”

“It’ll be ready in a jiff,” she said. She relayed my order to the kitchen and poured me a cup of coffee. Peggy and Harrison Taylor (Senior, not Junior) had been, as he liked to call it, “keeping company.” The age difference between the two had made his family a little nervous, especially Harrison’s daughter Elizabeth, who was fiercely protective of her biological father. But they—and the rest of us—quickly came to see how good Peggy was for the old man. She made him laugh, and she got him to have his blood pressure checked more frequently. She hadn’t been able to get him to cut down on his coffee consumption, but that was an impossible task no matter who was trying.

Burtis had already started in on his breakfast. I added cream and sugar to my coffee and took a long sip. It was hot and strong, just the way I liked it.

“What are you doin’ here so early?” he asked. “And don’t tell me it’s for the pleasure of my company, because I may have been born at night but it wasn’t last night.”

“I do like your company,” I said, “but there is something I wanted to talk to you about. Actually, someone.”

“Leo Janes.” He nudged a bite of scrambled egg onto his fork with the half slice of toast he was holding in his massive left hand.

“Sort of,” I said.

That got me a smile. “Now, how exactly are we ‘sort of’ going to talk about Leo Janes?”

“By talking about Elias Braeden.”

“I heard he was in town on some kind of business,” Burtis said, spearing a chunk of fried potato. It disappeared into his mouth.

“Did you know him when you worked for Idris?” I asked.

Peggy came back with my plate then. It held bacon and sausage, fluffy scrambled eggs, Yukon gold potatoes fried with onions and whole wheat toast. She topped up our coffee and then headed toward the booths with the pot.

“I knew Elias back in the day,” Burtis said. “We don’t run in the same circles now.” He grinned at me.

“Do you think he could have had anything to do with Leo Janes’s death?” I asked. I picked up my fork and started eating. The eggs were fluffy and the potatoes tasted of onion and dill.

“Not likely,” Burtis said. “From what I know of Elias now, he’s more likely to bury you with lawyers and paperwork than he is to just have you buried somewhere.” He reached for his coffee cup. “I take it Leo was still playin’ cards.”

“Enough to get banned from more than one casino in the state.”

“And one of them belonged to Elias.”

I nodded. “Leo had some kind of system worked out. And it looks like there were other people involved.”

“He was smart as a whip, you know. He’d figure the odds of a certain card turning up in his head and then bet according to that. It gave him an edge, not to mention he had a hell of a poker face. How much did he take Elias for?”

“Around a million dollars.”

Burtis shook his head. “I don’t care for cheaters myself and I can imagine how Elias felt. It’s a wonder he left Leo with a pot to”—he gave me a sideways glance—“bake beans in,” he finished. “So you think what, Kathleen? That Elias had Leo killed over what he won?”

I reached for my coffee again. “I don’t know. Elias told me what he wanted to know was how Leo was cheating. He’d figured out that Leo had some of his students involved but beyond that . . .” I shrugged. “Do you think it’s possible they had an argument and things just got out of hand?” The image of the back of Leo Janes’s head flashed in my mind. “Tell me I’m crazy,” I said.

“You’re not,” he said. “Elias has come a long way from the days when he used to move beer through the back wood for old Blackie. I told you before, it wasn’t what the old man did, it was what people thought he did that kept ’em in line. Elias learned that lesson. He’s a respectable businessman now—more or less—but just because you take the boy outta those woods doesn’t mean you take the lessons he learned outta him.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Thank you.”

We ate in silence for a couple of minutes. Then I felt Burtis’s eyes on me. “I hear you’ve been bragging about hanging around a few arcades in your younger days.”

I knew he was referring to my telling Marcus I could beat him at PAC-MAN. I gave an offhand shrug. “My mother always said it’s not bragging if you can do it.”

Burtis gave a snort of laughter. “That it isn’t,” he said.

We finished our breakfast and I told him about the box of photos from the old post office that the library had “inherited.” I lost the argument about paying for my own breakfast and I promised Burtis I would come out to the house to play a game of PAC-MAN with him, although I may have said I’d come out to beat him at a game of PAC-MAN. He left with a promise that he’d stop by the library once the photos were on display to see if he recognized anyone.

• • •

I took Celia Hunter’s scarf with me to the library and Marcus called midmorning to tell me she’d arrived at the station first thing, just the way she’d said she would. “It wasn’t her,” he said. “She’s too tiny to have hit Leo Janes.”

I made a face, glad that he couldn’t see me. Everything seemed to point back at Simon.

Mia came in right after school. Mary had brought in an album with the photos of Meredith Janes that she’d promised to show Mia.

“Is that your mother?” I asked Mary, pointing to a young woman leaning on a hoe and squinting into the sun in one photograph. It wasn’t so much that they looked alike, it was something about the way the young woman in the photo was standing, her unselfconscious stance, that made me think of Mary.