The Real MacAw (27 page)

Pick up some papers, my eye. Eleven o’clock would have been when he was debriefing his spies. I looked past him into his private office. I couldn’t see much, though I got an impression of ornate mahogany furniture in a space so large it echoed in spite of burgundy velvet upholstery. Was that the room where the macaw snatching and the assault on Grandfather were planned?

And what about Louise? When I’d heard about the mayor’s spies, I’d assumed Louise might be one of them. Against her will, of course, but she was desperate to keep her job. But apparently she’d made it back here and cleaned out her desk before the spies arrived.

What if she hadn’t cleaned out her desk at all? What if the mayor had done away with her and cleaned out her desk to make it look as if she’d fled?

Okay, probably too melodramatic. But maybe I should ask the chief to find Louise and make sure she was safe.

“She’s probably asked the cleaning crew to give it an extra polish or something,” the mayor was saying.

I pulled open the top drawer. It contained a stapler and a few pencils.

“I don’t think so.” I tried the next drawer. A few papers. “If she wanted the cleaners to polish it, she could just have put all her personal things in the drawers. She’s cleared out.”

“Damnation,” he said. “She
is
in on it!”

He turned as if to go back to his office.

I squatted down and gave the ficus an experimental tug. Yes, it was going to be a bear to lift. A gentleman would have seen me fumbling at the plant and asked if I needed help. I wasn’t expecting such an offer from the mayor.

“What are you doing with that tree?” he asked.

“County board’s recalling all the county-owned plants.” I wiggled the ficus a little closer to the luggage carrier. No sense carrying it any farther than I had to.

The mayor responded with a burst of foul language.

I fixed him with my frostiest stare and, in what Rob called my Mother voice, said, “I beg your pardon. If you’re trying to talk to me, please do so in a civil manner.”

He responded with another torrent of obscenity. I turned my back on him and prepared to hoist the plant.

But wait. Was it really wise to turn your back on someone so angry—someone whose office floor was littered with broken crockery? Someone I suspected of being involved in Parker’s death and the attack on Grandfather?

I turned back just in time to dodge a flying vase. It smashed against the wall beside the ficus.

“Assault,” I said, in the most annoyingly cheerful tone I could manage. “It will count as battery if you hit me, so I’d put that bookend down if I were you.”

Instead, he lobbed it at me. I caught it, easily.

My temper flared.

“And your aim’s pretty bad, too.” I tossed the bookend in my hand a couple of times, getting a sense of its weight and balance. “Mine, on the other hand, is pretty good. Doorknob,” I added, and threw the bookend at it, using my best fastball. Wonder of wonders, I hit the doorknob squarely.

He paled, backed a few steps away, and reached into his pocket for something.

Should I run? What if he pulled out a gun? Was this the time to mention that the garden club ladies knew I was up here and would call the police if I didn’t return soon?

His hands were shaking—whether from fear or anger I couldn’t tell. And it didn’t matter. Either way, I could almost certainly tackle him before he could get a shot off.

I relaxed a little when I saw that he was fumbling with his cell phone. Of course he could be calling whatever thug he’d used to attack Grandfather. Time for me to make tracks.

I returned to the ficus, though without turning my back on him.

“Get someone up here right now, dammit!” he shouted into the phone. “There’s another one of them here trying to steal things from my office!”

I hoisted the ficus and plopped it down on the luggage carrier.

“Unhand my plant!” He raced over and grabbed the pot.

“It’s not your plant!” I shouted back, grabbing the other side of the pot.

Just then, the chief strolled in, trailed by Sammy Wendell. They both blinked when they saw me and the mayor struggling over the ficus plant. Sammy stood frozen. The chief recovered a lot more quickly.

“You called 911,” he said. “What’s the nature of the emergency?”

The mayor let go of the ficus so suddenly that I staggered back and ricocheted off the empty desk. I landed in a heap on top of the luggage carrier, with the plant on top of me.

“Arrest her!” The mayor pointed at me and glared triumphantly.

“On what charges?” the chief said.

“She’s stealing town property!” the mayor shouted.

“The plants are county property.” I shoved the ficus aside and stood up. “Bought with county funds, and maintained under a contract signed by the county. And I’m assisting the Caerphilly Garden Club, which has been authorized by the county to remove the plants for safekeeping.”

“Trespassing on town property!” the mayor shrieked.

“These premises are actually county property,” the chief said. “At least until that confounded mortgage company shows up on Monday.”

“Littering,” the mayor said, pointing to some dirt that had spilled out of the fallen ficus’s pot. “And assault on a public official.”

“Put him down for assault and battery,” I said. “You saw him knock me down, right? He’s also been throwing vases and bookends at me and the other people who’ve tried to collect the plants.” I pointed to the shards of crockery at their feet.

“She’s lying!” the mayor shouted. “Arrest her! Arrest her!”

“I’m not arresting anyone,” the chief said. “Not on
your
orders.”

He reached into his pocket and took out something. A badge. He held it in his hand for a few seconds, looking at it. No, not looking at it. More like looking inward while his eyes were on it. Then he took a step forward.

The mayor stepped back hastily.

The chief opened his hand to give the mayor his badge.

“I hereby offer you my resignation,” he said.

“I’m not accepting it,” the mayor said. He backed a few more steps away.

“Let me rephrase that,” the chief said. “I quit. Effective immediately.”

He put the badge down on Louise’s desk and took a step back. The mayor stared at the polished gold shield as if he expected it to turn into a rattlesnake.

“Sammy?” The chief’s eyes were still on the mayor.

Sammy, who had been staring in openmouthed astonishment, blinked once or twice and then snapped to attention.

“Yes, sir!” he said.

“Go call Debbie Anne and give her the news,” the chief said.

“Yes, sir!” Sammy saluted and dashed out.

The mayor recovered his voice and uttered a few obscenities.

“I’ll thank you to mind your language,” the chief snapped.

“I don’t need you to teach me manners!” the mayor shouted.

“You darn well need someone to,” the chief said. “A public official should have more respect for himself and the citizens.”

I had the feeling the chief had wanted to say something like that for years.

The chief turned to me.

“That’s a mighty big plant,” he said. “Let me help you with it.”

“I’ve got a luggage carrier,” I said.

We both glanced down at the crumpled metal frame.

“But I don’t think it’s going to work very well,” I went on. “I’d appreciate the help.”

“You can’t do this!” the mayor shrieked.

“I just did,” the chief said. “Let’s lift with our knees, not our backs,” he added to me. I suppressed a chuckle at the thought of how many times his wife had probably told him the same thing.

“Don’t abandon me!” the mayor wailed.

“One. Two. Three. Lift!” the chief said.

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.

“Getting back to the case,” I said. “Did you ever manage to track down Louise? The mayor’s secretary?”

“The one you suspect of helping Mr. Blair get his hands on that copy of the contract?” He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. I wasn’t sure if he found my question interesting, or if he just welcomed the excuse to take a break.

“I’m not sure I really suspect her,” I said. “She sounded sincere when she said that no matter how much she hated her boss, she wouldn’t do that to him. But maybe she fooled me, and even if it wasn’t her, she might have a good idea who else would have had access.”

He nodded.

“That thought had occurred to me as well,” he said. “And I have been trying to reach Ms. Dietz all day. Without success.”

My stomach did a somersault at hearing that.

“Maybe she’s making a run for it,” I suggested. “Or—what if she knows too much and someone decided they needed to get rid of her, too.”

“Annoying as it is not to be able to reach her, I think it’s a little early to jump to that conclusion,” the chief said. He put his handkerchief away and squatted to pick up another plant. “Maybe she just likes to spend her Sundays doing something other than sitting indoors by her telephone.”

“Yes, but don’t you think it’s a little odd that she apparently cleared off her desk and turned in her keys?”

He put the plant down again and turned to me with a frown.

“You’re sure of that?”

“That’s her desk in the mayor’s anteroom,” I said. “He was complaining before you arrived that he’d left her a message to come in and she hadn’t shown up. I think he assumes she’s in on the evacuation, and maybe she is. But according to him, her desk was cleared off by eleven last night. And I don’t even think the Fight or Flight Committee had made its decision by that time, much less sent out the word. She must have come down here straight from the meeting.”

“Maybe she thought she saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to waste no time,” he said.