She gave him a chilly spare—me smile, then got up to pour herself a fresh cup of coffee. The first one was already gone.
“You probably know about the Beadie murders,” he said.
“The man who kills women and then sends their ID to the police?” She came back to the table, her coffee cup perfectly steady in her hand. “The newspapers dine out on that one.”
He pointed at her—Bob’s finger-gun gesture—and tipped her a wink. “Got that right. Yessir. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ that’s their motto. I happened to work the case a little. I wasn’t retired then, but getting on to it. I had kind of a reputation as a fellow who could sometimes get results by sniffing around… following my whatdoyoucallums…”
“Instincts?”
Once more with the finger-gun. Once more with the wink. As if there were a secret, and they were both in on it. “Anyway, they send me out to work on my own, you know-old limping Holt shows his pictures around, asks his questions, and kind’ve… you know… just sniffs. Because I’ve always had a nose for this kind of work, Darcy, and never really lost it. This was in the fall of 1997, not too long after a woman named Stacey Moore was killed. Name ring a bell?”
“I don’t think so,” Darcy said.
“You’d remember if you’d seen the crime scene photos. Terrible murder—how that woman must have suffered. But of course, this fellow who calls himself Beadie had stopped for a long time, over fifteen years, and he must have had a lot of steam built up in his boiler, just waiting to blow. And it was her that got scalded.
“Anyway, the fella who was SAG back then put me on it. ‘Let old Holt take a shot,’ he says, ‘he’s not doing anything else, and it’ll keep him out from underfoot.’ Even then old Holt was what they called me. Because of the limp, I should imagine. I talked to her friends, her relatives, her neighbors out there on Route 106, and the people she worked with in Waterville. Oh, I talked to them plenty. She was a waitress at a place called the Sunnyside Restaurant there in town. Lots of transients stop in, because the turnpike’s just down the road, but I was more interested in her regular customers. Her regular male customers.”
“Of course you would be,” she murmured.
“One of them turned out to be a presentable, well-turned-out fella in his mid or early forties. Came in every three or four weeks, always took one of Stacey’s booths. Now, probably I shouldn’t say this, since the fella turned out to be your late husband-speaking ill of the dead, but since they’re both dead, I kind’ve figure that cancels itself out, if you see what I mean…” Ramsey ceased, looking confused.
“You’re getting all tangled up,” Darcy said, amused in spite of herself. Maybe he wanted her to be amused. She couldn’t tell. “Do yourself a favor and just say it, I’m a big girl. She flirted with him? Is that what it comes down to? She wouldn’t be the first waitress to flirt with a man on the road, even if the man had a wedding ring on his finger.”
“No, that wasn’t quite it. According to what the other waitstaff told me—and of course you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they all liked her—it was him that flirted with her. And according to them, she didn’t like it much. She said the guy gave her the creeps.”
“That doesn’t sound like my husband.” Or what Bob had told her, for that matter.
“No, but it probably was. Your husband, I mean. And a wife doesn’t always know what a hubby does on the road, although she may think she does. Anyway, one of the waitresses told me this fella drove a Toyota 4Runner. She knew because she had one just like it. And do you know what? A number of the Moore woman’s neighbors had seen a 4Runner like that out and about in the area of the family farmstand just days before the woman was murdered. Once only a day before the killing took place.”
“But not on the day.”
“No, but of course a fella as careful as this Beadie would look out for a thing like that. Wouldn’t he?”
“I suppose.”
“Well, I had a description and I canvassed the area around the restaurant. I had nothing better to do. For a week all I got was blisters and a few cups of mercy-coffee—none as good as yours, though!—and I was about to give up. Then I happened to stop at a place downtown. Mickleson’s Coins. Does that name ring a bell?”
“Of course. My husband was a numismatist and Mickleson’s was one of the three or four best buy-and-sell shops in the state. It’s gone now. Old Mr. Mickleson died and his son closed the business.”
“Yep. Well, you know what the song says, time takes it all in the end—your eyes, the spring in your step, even your friggin jump shot, pardon my French. But George Mickleson was alive then—”
“Upright and sniffin the air,” Darcy murmured.
Holt Ramsey smiled. “Just as you say. Anyway, he recognized the description. ‘Why, that sounds like Bob Anderson,’ he says. And guess what? He drove a Toyota 4Runner.”
“Oh, but he traded that in a long time ago,” Darcy said. “For a—”
“Chevrolet Suburban, wasn’t it?” Ramsey pronounced the company name Shivvalay.
“Yes.” Darcy folded her hands and looked at Ramsey calmly. They were almost down to it. The only question was which partner in the now-dissolved Anderson marriage this sharp-eyed old man was more interested in.
“Don’t suppose you still have that Suburban, do you?”
“No. I sold it about a month after my husband died. I put an ad in Uncle Henry’s swap guide, and someone snapped it right up. I thought I’d have problems, with the high mileage and gas being so expensive, but I didn’t. Of course I didn’t get much.”
And two days before the man who’d bought it came to pick it up, she had searched it carefully, from stem to stern, not neglecting to pull out the carpet in the cargo compartment. She found nothing, but still paid fifty dollars to have it washed on the outside (which she didn’t care about) and steam-cleaned on the inside (which she did).
“Ah. Good old Uncle Henry’s. I sold my late wife’s Ford the same way.”
“Mr. Ramsey—”
“Holt.”
“Holt, were you able to positively identify my husband as the man who used to flirt with Stacey Moore?”
“Well, when I talked to Mr. Anderson, he admitted he’d been in the Sunnyside from time to time-admitted it freely—but he claimed he never noticed any of the waitresses in particular. Claimed he usually had his head buried in paperwork. But of course I showed his picture—from his driver’s license, you understand—and the staff allowed as how it was him.”
“Did my husband know you had a… a particular interest in him?”
“No. Far as he was concerned, I was just old Limpin’ Lennie looking for witnesses who might have seen something. No one fears an old duck like me, you know.”
I fear you plenty.
“It’s not much of a case,” she said. “Assuming you were trying to make one.”
“No case at all!” He laughed cheerily, but his hazel eyes were cold. “If I could have made a case, me and Mr. Anderson wouldn’t have had our little conversation in his office, Darcy. We would have had it in my office. Where you don’t get to leave until I say you can. Or until a lawyer springs you, of course.”
“Maybe it’s time you stopped dancing, Holt.”
“All right,” he agreed, “why not? Because even a box-step hurts me like hell these days. Damn that old Dwight Cheminoux, anyway! And I don’t want to take your whole morning, so let’s speed this up. I was able to confirm a Toyota 4Runner at or near the scene of two of the earlier murders—what we call Beadie’s first cycle. Not the same one; a different color. But I was also able to confirm that your husband owned another 4Runner in the seventies.”
“That’s right. He liked it, so he traded for the same kind.”
“Yep, men will do that. And the 4Runner’s a popular vehicle in places where it snows half the damn year. But after the Moore murder—and after I talked to him—he traded for a Suburban.”
“Not immediately,” Darcy said with a smile. “He had that 4Runner of his well after the turn of the century.”
“I know. He traded in 2004, not long before Andrea Honeycutt was murdered down Nashua way. Blue and gray Suburban; year of manufacture 2002. A Suburban of that approximate year and those exact colors was seen quite often in Mrs. Honeycutt’s neighborhood during the month or so before she was murdered. But here’s the funny thing.” He leaned forward. “I found one witness who said that Suburban had a Vermont plate, and another—a little old lady of the type who sits in her living room window and watches all the neighborhood doins from first light to last, on account of having nothing better to do—said the one she saw had a New York plate.”