“Sneaky,” I said, shaking my head.
“That was the last time I went booking with him.”
“So it wasn’t just his customers who might want to kill him,” I said. “Any other dealer who knew him would, too.”
“Definitely,” she said, with a laugh. “Maybe I should work on my alibi.”
She turned away and resumed her long-distance book scanning.
“You want to know who I think killed him?” she said, over her shoulder. “Ralph.”
“Ralph?”
“His ex-partner,” she said. “Ralph Endicott.”
“They didn’t part on good terms?”
She laughed.
“Have you seen him here today?” I asked.
She straightened up, shaded her eyes with one hand, and scanned the crowd.
“Over there by the lemonade stand,” she said. “The tall man in the brown corduroy jacket and jeans.”
“Thanks,” I said. I smiled to myself. I recognized Ralph, the ex-partner, as one of the people who’d gone into the barn, presumably to see Gordon.
I stopped off long enough to point out the bookseller and the ex-partner to Sammy as possible suspects, then wrestled the card table into the house and lugged it into the dining room. Of course the dining room was the only logical choice for the chief’s interrogations. With a house full of relatives, we weren’t giving up access to the refrigerator, so the kitchen was out. The living room didn’t have a door to close it off from the hallway, only a wide, open archway, so even if we convinced Eric and Frankie to rehearse their Tarzan yells and hyena laughs outdoors so the chief would have peace and quiet, he wouldn’t have much privacy. No, the dining room was the place.
Especially since the chief probably didn’t know that we had a dumbwaiter running from the basement up to the dining room and then on to the master bedroom above. A dumbwaiter that carried sounds reasonably well. I set the table right in front of the dumbwaiter door, then went to the kitchen, filled a pitcher with ice water, and set it on the table, with a couple of glasses. A nice hospitable touch to make it less likely that the chief would move the table.
I was about to check to see if the dumbwaiter door was latched—it had an unnerving habit of drifting slowly open if we left it unlatched—when I heard the chief coming down the hall, so I hurriedly leaped away and was standing across the room, gazing out the window, when the chief entered.
“Will this do?” I asked.
“Just fine,” the chief said. “Where’s your phone, anyway? My cell phone’s not getting great reception out here.”
“We don’t have one yet,” I said.
“I’d have thought you’d find a phone pretty useful, all the time you’ve been spending out here,” he said, frowning.
“We did,” I said. “And so did the Sprockets. After paying several hundred dollars in long distance charges that we knew but could not prove were made by various visiting Sprockets, we had the line disconnected.”
The chief frowned and nodded.
“Sounds about par for the course with those Sprockets,” he said. “Can’t tell you how relieved I was that none of them were moving in here.”
Considering how much I annoyed the chief, that certainly said a lot about the Sprockets.
“Anything else you need?” I asked. “Shall I fetch anyone?”
“Sammy can do that,” the chief said. “Don’t worry; if we need anything, we’ll let you know.”
He smiled, and stood in the center of the room, motionless, in what I deduced was a subtle hint that my presence was no longer needed.
I walked out of the room slowly, looking behind me as I went, in a deliberate show of reluctance. Of course, I hadn’t really expected the chief to let me stay, but he’d be suspicious if I didn’t at least try to lurk nearby.
I decided to check outside to make sure no one needed me before taking up my eavesdropping vantage point. And if the chief saw me outside, all the better.
Outside, I saw that the fenced-in area was nearly empty—of people, that is; the Army of Clutter was still there in all its glory. Two acres, covered almost entirely with stuff. Tables piled high with stuff. Boxes filled with stuff. Aisles and rows and huge messy clusters of larger stuff. Enough racks of clothes to stock a department store, if any of the garments were still in style and in reasonable condition. Several thousand books, though that number would probably shrink to several hundred if we didn’t count duplicate copies of The Da Vinci Code and a handful of other recent bestsellers. Three or four houses’ worth of furniture, some of it actually sound enough for use. All lying peacefully in the autumn sunshine, undisturbed except for the small area where the local evidence technician was industriously photographing the contents of a table while Cousin Horace meticulously dusted the contents of the adjacent table for fingerprints.