Charlaine Harris - Crimes by Moonlight

“That’s all the investigation Bill’s death got?”

Dolbert shrugged, blew a smoke circle. “All that was warranted.”

I sat forward. “All that was warranted. A local boy, who gave an arm and a leg to his country, wins a damn Silver Star doin’ it, and you figure him getting his spine snapped like a twig and damn near every bone in his body broken, well, that’s just pretty much business as usual here in Hopeful.”

Under the heavy lids, fire flared in the fat chief’s eyes. “You think you knew Bill Reynolds? You knew the old Bill. You didn’t know the drunken stumblebum he turned into. Prime candidate for stepping out in front of a car.”

“I never knew Bill to drink to excess-”

“How much time did you spend with him lately?”

A hot rush of shame crawled up my neck. I’d seen Bill from time to time, in the city, when he came in to see me, but I’d never come up to Hopeful. Never really gone out of my way for him, since the war…

Till now.

“You make any effort to find the hit-and-run driver that did this?”

The chief shrugged. “Nobody saw it happen.”

“You don’t even know for sure a car did it.”

“How the hell else could it have happened?”

I stood up, pushed back, the legs of my wooden chair scraping the hard floor like fingernails on a blackboard. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

A finger as thick as a pool cue waggled at me. “You got no business stickin’ your damn nose in around here, Hammer-”

“I’m a licensed investigator in the state of New York, pops. And I’m working for Bill Reynolds’s aunt.”

He snorted a laugh. “Working for that senile old biddy? She’s out at the county hospital. She’s broke! Couldn’t even afford a damn funeral… we had to bury the boy in potter’s field…”

That was one of Hopeful’s claims to fame: the state buried its unknown, unclaimed, impoverished dead in the potter’s field here.

“Why didn’t you tell Uncle Sam?” I demanded. “Bill was a war hero-they’d’ve put him in Arlington…”

Dolbert shrugged. “Not my job.”

“What the hell is your job?”

“Watch your mouth, city boy.” He nodded toward the holding cells, and the cigarette quivered as the fat mouth sneered. “Don’t forget you’re in my world…”

Maybe Bill Reynolds didn’t get a funeral or a gravestone, but he was going to get a memorial by way of an investigation.

ONLY nobody in Hopeful wanted to talk to me. The supposed “accident” had occurred in the middle of the night, and my only chance for a possible witness was in the all-night diner across from the Civil War cannon in the park.

The diner’s manager, a skinny character with a horsey face darkened by perpetual five o’clock shadow, wore a grease-stained apron over his grease-stained T-shirt. Like the chief, he had a cigarette drooping from slack lips. The ash narrowly missed falling into the cup of coffee he’d served me as I sat at the counter with half a dozen locals.

“We got a jukebox, mister,” the manager said. “Lots of kids end up here, tail end of a Saturday night. That was a Saturday night, when Bill got it, ya know? That loud music, joint jumpin‘, there coulda been a train wreck out there, and nobody’da heard it.”

“Nobody would have seen an accident out your windows?”

The manager shrugged. “Maybe ol’ Bill got hit on the other side of the park.”

But it was just a little square of grass and benches and such; the “other side of the park” was easily visible from the windows lining the diner booths-even factoring in the grease and lettering.

I talked to a couple of waitresses who claimed not to have been working that night. One of them, Gladys her name tag said, a heavyset bleached blonde who must have been pretty cute twenty years ago, served me a slice of apple pie and cheese and a piece of information.

“Bill said he was going to work as a handyman,” I said, “for some good-lookin’ gal. You know who that would’ve been?”

“Sure,” Gladys said. She had sky-blue eyes and nicotine-yellow teeth. “He was working out at the mansion.”

“The what?”

“The mansion. The old Riddle place. You must’ve passed it on the highway, comin’ into town.”

“I saw a gate and a drive, and got a glimpse of a big old gothic brick barn…”

She nodded, refilled my coffee. “That’s the one. The Riddles, they owned this town forever. Ain’t a building downtown that the Riddles ain’t owned since the dawn of time. But Mr. Riddle, he was the last of the line, and he and his wife died in that plane crash, oh, ten years ago. The only one left now is the daughter, Victoria.”

“What was Bill doing out at the Riddle place?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? Maybe Miz Riddle just wanted some company. Bill was still a handsome so-and-so, even minus a limb or two. He coulda put his shoe under my bed anytime.”

“Victoria Riddle isn’t married? She lives alone?”

“Alone except for that hairless ape.”

“What?”

“She’s got a sort of butler, you know, a servant? He was her father’s chauffeur. Big guy. Mute. Comes into town, does the grocery shopping and such. We hardly ever see Miz Riddle, less she’s meeting with her lawyer, or going to the bank to visit all her money.”

“What does she do out there?”

“Who knows? She’s not interested in business. Her daddy, he had his finger in every pie around here. Miz Riddle, she lets her lawyer run things, and I guess the family money, uh, under-what’s-it? Underwrites, is that the word?”

“I guess.”

“Underwrites her research.”

“Research?”

“Oh, yeah. Miz Riddle’s a doctor.”

“Medical doctor.”

“Yes, but not the kind that hangs out a shingle. She’s some kind of scientific genius.”

“So she’s doing medical research out there?”

“I guess.” She shook her head. “Pity about Bill. Such a nice fella.”

“Had he been drinking heavy?”

“Bill? Naw. Oh, he liked a drink. I suppose he shut his share of bars down on a Saturday night, but he wasn’t no alcoholic. Not like that other guy.”

“What other guy?”

Her expression turned distant. “Funny.”

“What’s funny? What other guy?”

“Not funny ha-ha. Funny weird. That other guy, don’t remember his name, just some tramp who come through, he was a crip, too.”

“A crip?”

“Yeah. He had one arm. Guess he lost his in the war, too. He was working out at the Riddle mansion as a handyman-one-handed handyman. That guy, he really was a drunk.”

“What became of him?”

“That’s what’s funny weird. Three, four months ago, he wound up like Bill. They found him in the gutter on Main Street, all banged up, deader than a bad battery. Hit-and-run victim-just like Bill.”

THE wrought-iron gate in the gray-brick wall stood open, and I tooled the heap up a winding red-brick drive across a gentle, treeless slope where the sprawling gabled tan-brick gothic mansion crouched like a lion about to pounce. The golf course of a lawn had its own rough behind the house, a virtual forest preserve that seemed at once to shelter and encroach upon the stark lines of the house.

Steps led to an open cement pedestal of a porch with a massive slab of a wooden door where I had a choice between an ornate iron knocker and a simple doorbell. I rang the bell.

I stood there, listening to birds chirping and enjoying the cool breeze that seemed to whisper rain was on its way, despite the golden sunshine reflecting off the lawn. I rang the bell again.

I was about to go around back, to see if there was another door I could try, when that massive slab of wood creaked open like the start of the Inner Sanctum radio program; the 350-pound apparition who stood suddenly before me would have been at home on a spook show himself.