“You go on down to the barn and get started,” the chief told Horace—who had shed his beloved gorilla suit, apparently in the interest of looking more professional.
“And be careful,” I said.
The chief raised an eyebrow at me.
“Tell all your officers to be careful in there,” I said. “The barn’s old, and run down, and we’re not sure it’s structurally sound. No one was supposed to go in there.”
“Ah,” the chief said. “That’s the reason for the KEEP OUT signs. Makes sense. Knowing those Sprockets, it’s a mercy the whole thing didn’t fall down years ago.”
“If Gordon had paid any attention to the signs, maybe he’d be alive today,” I said. “Of course, a whole lot of other people ignored them as well.”
“Such as?” the chief said, taking out a small notebook.
“I don’t know all their names,” I said. “Barrymore Sprocket probably knows more than I do—he went in and tried to chase Gordon out, with no success.”
“We’ll talk to him,” the chief said, scribbling notes. “Right now, just tell me who you saw.”
“The Hummel lady, for one,” I said, pointing to her. “I don’t know her name, but that’s her, over there in the flowered dress.”
The chief nodded, and scribbled in his notebook. Why couldn’t he satisfy my curiosity by exclaiming, “Oh, you mean Mrs. So-and-so?”
“Then there was a man in a gigantic Mexican sombrero,” I said. “He’s probably still around somewhere. And a tall man in a brown jacket. And one of the Gypsies—we have quite a lot of Gypsies, so I’m not quite sure which one. Oh, and Giles might have gone in to talk to him about a book.”
He couldn’t claim I’d left out Giles. But had my casual manner made Giles seem less suspicious or more? The chief just kept scribbling.
“Of course, I didn’t necessarily see everyone who went into the barn,” I said. “I was trying to keep the yard sale running. There could have been dozens of others.”
“Hmm,” the chief said, looking up from his notebook. “Somehow I suspect you didn’t miss much.”
Just then Horace returned, escorting a uniformed officer who held something in his latex-gloved hands.
The other owl-shaped bookend.
“We found it in the barn, sir,” the officer said, placing it on the evidence table. “Appears to be a match for the murder weapon.”
Of course, Giles picked that moment to stroll up.
“I didn’t know you were closing so early,” he said, blinking with confusion at the general exodus toward the checkout line. “I don’t suppose—oh, there it is. Have you found the other one as well?”
He was pointing, of course, at the owl-shaped bookend.
“Is this yours, sir?” Chief Burke asked, with narrowed eyes.
“Er … no, not exactly,” Giles said, blinking with confusion. “Not yet anyway. I suppose it belongs to Dr. Langslow. I got it from his table, anyway. I was planning to buy it.”
I winced. To someone who didn’t know him well, Giles’s stammer and his unwillingness to meet the chief’s eyes probably smacked of guilt. I realized that this was simply his normal behavior when forced to talk to anyone he didn’t know very well about any subject other than nineteenth-century English poetry, but just how well did Chief Burke know Giles?
“And just what did you do with it in the meantime?” the chief asked.
“Carried it around with me,” Giles said. “Them, actually—there’s another one someplace. I don’t suppose you’ve found it, eh? Anyway, I’m afraid I threw them down after I lost my temper with that beastly Gordon McCoy.”
“And one of them struck Mr. McCoy,” the chief said, nodding.
“Good heavens no!” Giles exclaimed. “Just threw them down—over there in the barn. Although a few minutes ago, when I returned to look—”
He took a step or two in the direction of the barn and the chief headed him off by stepping in his path, the way a Border collie would guide a large and rather flustered sheep.
“The barn’s off-limits,” the chief said. “Just what were you and Mr. McCoy quarreling about?”
“It wasn’t a quarrel,” Giles said. “He offered to sell me a book at an exorbitant price, and I told him I wouldn’t pay that much even if I wanted it, and I already had a copy. And then he said something rude, and I replied in kind and threw the bookends down in a temper. And when I returned later to apologize and reclaim my bookends, I couldn’t find him or them.”