I pulled the dumbwaiter up, slowly, so it wouldn’t bang around in the shaft. On the third try, I found a way to fit myself in the dumbwaiter and still leave my arms free to reach outside and tug on the ropes. Luckily for me it was an oversized dumbwaiter. I wondered if in some bygone era the Sprockets had been legendary for the size and splendor of their dinner parties—I had a hard time imagining even a restaurant needing a dumbwaiter quite so large.
I lowered the dumbwaiter, hand over hand, until its top was only a foot above the bottom of the door, which gave me as little distance as possible to cover if I had to get out of sight quickly. I could still hear fine. And while the doors that opened from the shaft into the dining room were closed, they didn’t fit all that well, and the right panel had a number of cracks and splits, so I could even see out, though at the moment the only thing in my field of vision was the chief’s leather coat, slung over the back of one of the folding chairs.
Apparently I arrived in the middle of an interesting interrogation.
“And you expect us to believe that!” the chief exclaimed.
Chapter 13
Believe what? I wanted to shout. But whoever Chief Burke was questioning didn’t answer, and the chief’s favorite interrogation technique was to sit and stare reproachfully at his subjects until they threw up their hands and talked. Which worked a lot of the time, but wasn’t very amusing for anyone trying to eavesdrop.
Or perhaps he was interrogating someone with a hearing problem. Perhaps, even now, penetrating questions, harsh accusations, and frantic denials were flying back and forth at breakneck speed in sign language. Just as I began to imagine the killer blurting out a halting confession with trembling, exhausted fingers, a voice broke the silence.
“I don’t know what else you want,” an unknown man said. “When I realized I was wasting my time, I told him to call me when he was serious about doing business, and I left. That’s it.”
“And Mr. McCoy was still alive when you left.”
“Alive and well.”
The other man’s voice sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put a name or a face to it. I peered out, and saw the crisp black shoulder of the chief’s shirt. Then the shoulder shifted, and I caught a glimpse of the giant sombrero I’d seen one of Gordon’s barn visitors wearing.
“These papers he wanted to sell you—were they valuable enough that someone else would kill him for them?”
“Since I never got to see them, I have no idea,” Sombrero said. “I can’t imagine that they would be. Where would Gordon have gotten something that valuable?”
The voice was precise, dry, and slightly pedantic; it teased my memory.
“And there’s no one who had a reason to kill him?” the chief asked.
“From what little contact I had with him, I can imagine there might be all sorts of people with ample reason to kill him,” Sombrero said, sounding slightly testy. “But I’m afraid I have no idea who could have done it.”
“And there’s nothing else you can think of that might help us?”
Silence. I assume Sombrero must have shaken his head, or perhaps shrugged.
Chief Burke sighed.
“Thank you, Professor Schmidt,” he said.
Professor Schmidt. I remembered him now. One of Michael’s colleagues at the English department. One of the stuffier ones he avoided. Okay, I could probably find a way to run into Professor Schmidt again if I wanted to find out more.
“Is that all?” Schmidt asked.
“I’ll call you if we think of anything else. Show him out, Sammy.”
I heard the folding chair scrape across the floor and a depressing number of boards that squeaked as Sammy and Professor Schmidt walked over them. I wished I had room to take out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe. I needed to make a note to find out how to fix squeaking floorboards.
“He could have done it,” a slightly hoarse tenor voice said. “He clearly hated the victim.”
“Sammy, Sammy,” the chief chided, softly, in his musical baritone. “Everyone hated him. We wouldn’t have standing room in the jail if we arrested everyone who hated him. But this isn’t an Agatha Christie novel. They didn’t all gang up and stuff him in that blasted trunk. Bring in that ex-partner of his.”
More squeaking. Squeaking door hinges, too, as Sammy ushered the ex-partner in.
“Ralph Endicott,” the partner said, introducing himself to the chief. Again I wished I could scribble in my notebook, as Endicott rattled off his address and phone number. Never mind. Caerphilly was a small town. If he wasn’t in the book, someone I know would know where to find him.