The Real Macaw(82)

The mayor continued to shriek threats and pleas as we lugged the plant out of his office and down the hallway. Halfway to the elevator, the shouts were replaced by thuds, the occasional sound of breaking glass, and more bursts of language nearly as blue as the macaw’s. The chief frowned and his jaw muscle twitched a little.

I kept thinking that I should say something, but I couldn’t think what, so I saved my wind for hauling. By the time we got the ficus down to the part of the sidewalk where the garden club ladies were staging the plants, I was profoundly glad the chief had offered to help. I could have done it myself, but I’d have regretted it for days—in fact I probably still would.

A small knot of lavender-hatted ladies greeted our arrival with cheers.

“Excellent!” one said. “You braved the lion’s den.”

“Not without cost,” I muttered. “I’m afraid your luggage cart is a goner. And there’s a big spider plant in the third-floor elevator lobby that needs to be brought down.”

“I’ll go!” Several ladies began dashing up the courthouse steps.

“Let’s just label this so we know where it came from,” another lady said.

She slapped an adhesive label on the pot and, with a triumphant flourish, wrote “Mayor’s Office” on it in elegant printing that could almost pass for calligraphy.

“Now all we have to do is get them in the truck,” one of the ladies said. The others began rolling up their sleeves and looking determined.

Who had chosen this crew to tackle the town hall’s plants, anyway? Not a one of them was over five foot two or under seventy.

The chief and I exchanged looks.

“Let us help you with that,” he said. “Meg, you get in the truck. I’ll lift them in and you can shove them into place.”

The garden club ladies didn’t argue much. In fact, as soon as they saw we were hard at work, they went into a brief huddle and then told us they were going to move on to the next building.

The chief and I lifted and shoved for a few minutes in silence. Then a thought occurred to me. I straightened up and looked around to make sure no one else was hovering nearby before sharing it with the chief.

“I’m not trying to interfere with your investigation,” I said. “But I was wondering—”

And then I stopped. Technically, the chief wasn’t the chief anymore. What happened to the investigation?

“Don’t worry,” he said, as if reading my mind. “It’s still my investigation.”

“In spite of your resignation?”

“I’m still deputy sheriff, remember?” he said.

“But this crime’s in town,” I said. “What if the mayor appoints a new police chief? Not that I’m paranoid, but the mayor’s a suspect. Do we really trust anyone he appoints to investigate properly?”

“No,” he said. “And since I knew things might come to a head between me and the mayor before too long, I went out to the sheriff’s farm last night, and we had a good long talk. He tells me that in the event the town doesn’t have a police chief, he has the authority to assume jurisdiction over the case.”

And since the sheriff, who was in his mid-nineties, was more or less an elected figurehead these days, delegating everything to his deputy, that meant the chief would still be in charge.

“If he’s correct—” I said.

“It occurred to me to wonder about that,” he said. “Sounds more like the sort of thing they used to do back in his heyday, twenty years ago.”

“I think his heyday was more like forty years ago,” I said. “And that’s probably how they did things. Of course, maybe it was legal back then.”

“I like to know where things stand,” he said. “So this morning I ran the whole problem by the county DA. And she assures me that the sheriff is right. As long as there’s no police chief, the sheriff’s department has jurisdiction. No police chief, and for that matter, no police.”

“Your officers are all resigning, too?”

“Most of them don’t have to,” he said. “Most are already on the county payroll, and the rest will be by Monday morning.”

“You were planning to resign, then?”

He sighed.

“Not so much planning to resign as resigned to the fact that sooner or later, the mayor would force me to. So we came up with a plan, just in case. And the DA’s plotting out all the legal strategies she can use if the mayor tries to appoint a puppet.”

I nodded. I had every confidence that the DA could find a lot of ways to delay things. Still—the sooner the chief could solve the case, the better.