Chapter 10
At work the next day, I was back to worrying about Ben and his alibi. Had he really been running errands between six and seven, or was he hiding something from Tremaine? My hand went to the telephone two or three times, but it was a dumb idea to call Ben. He was at work and he couldn’t talk freely in front of his co-workers. Besides, if I asked him flat out about his alibi, he might think I had some crazy ideas about his involvement with his father’s death. Which I had, heaven help me, but he didn’t need to know that. In the end, I decided to let it ride and wait for Ben and Tremaine to hash out the alibi between them.
On the ride home, I wondered if Amy would be calling today with news about Jack and his fellow actors. The trouble was, I didn’t know what her shooting schedule was or if she could come up with an excuse to hang around the set and ask questions if she wasn’t needed, so I had no idea when I might be hearing from her again. There was no message waiting on my voice mail when I got home. Frustrated, I took Wendy for a hike after supper. It tired me out, but didn’t do anything to improve my state of mind. It was still bright when we got home, so I left Wendy inside the house and walked to the Post Office to pick up my mail. The usual stuff was waiting in my box: one bill and three grocery store fliers.
Leaving the Post Office, I walked over to Hank’s Hearty Home-Cooking to see if anything had happened at that crime scene. Nothing had changed except for the removal of the orange traffic cones. I assumed that the police weren’t letting Henry begin the clean-up until they had gleaned every scrap of evidence that they could find. Some of the green plastic covering the damage had torn loose in the wind and was flapping against the grey siding. It was a depressing sight, giving the impression that the investigation had been abandoned.
Henry’s accusation against Frank was just plain crazy. Had Henry claimed that Frank had been driving the truck that ran into his restaurant just because the two men had never got along? The only two things they had in common was their membership in the Crane town council and their ownership of restaurants. Frank was laid-back, a survivor of the “flower-power” generation, while Henry was priggish and nervous. I knew that Henry drove Frank crazy on the town council with his resistance to change and overly-cautious attitude. For example, Frank was all for promoting Crane with Alberta Tourism to bring more business into our sleepy little town, but Henry was afraid of attracting the “wrong kind of folks.” It took Frank forever to pass anything new through council with all of Henry’s questions and foot-dragging, even when it was something as innocuous as a municipal garden contest. There was definitely some animosity between the two men, but Frank would never have driven a truck through Henry’s restaurant. Wondering if my friend, May, whose store was right across the street from Henry’s, had heard anything, I wandered over to May’s Groceries and More for a chat.
May was alone that night. Her son, Gerry, had helped out in the store during the day and on alternate weekends ever since May’s husband had died of an unexpected heart attack six years earlier. May lived in a snug apartment over the store while her son and his family owned a two-storey a couple of blocks away. My friend was a huge Calgary Flames hockey fan and had erected a sign with the team’s trademark red “C” on the store’s roof. Every time the Flames won, May lit up the sign for a whole week. That bright red light cut through blowing snow like a beacon on blustery evenings, and let me know that home and safety were not far away when I was driving back from the city.
The store interior had an old-fashioned appearance thanks to the painted green plank flooring and the original green wooden shelves that May’s husband had built twenty-eight years ago. Three wide windows across the front of the building provided lots of daylight, while banks of fluorescent lights illuminated the store at night. A garish red and blue lottery machine glowed beside the cash register next to the front door. May was sitting on a stool behind the register, her slippered feet propped up on a shelf, engrossed in our next book club selection. We were working our way through the mystery classics, and this month’s selection was Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night. I was a big fan of Sayers, so I didn’t mind reading the book again. As a matter of fact, I had a soft-cover collection of her novels in my living room bookcase, right next to the Agatha Christies.
“Hi, May, how’s it going?” I asked, crossing the narrow space between the door and the cash register. I took a moment to study her candy bar selection, and decided that a dollar-sized bar wasn’t going to be big enough for tonight. Tonight I needed the $2.50-sized bar with caramel and almonds.
May looked up, her blunt-cut, grey hair swinging away from her square, rosy face. She had given up smoking six weeks ago and always had something in her mouth these days. Tonight’s treat was a lime sucker.
“Hi doll, what are you doing wandering around? It’s pretty chilly out there.” Her button brown eyes crinkled up at the corners as she smiled at me.
“I just couldn’t settle down. Too much on my mind. How’s business?”
“Can’t complain. Having a movie crew over in Longview sure helps bring in the tourists. DVD rentals on Viggo Mortensen’s movies are way up, too.”
“Oh yeah? Have you got a copy of Hidalgo? I’ve always liked that movie.”
“I’ll check. Chocolate and Viggo Mortensen – sounds like a great evening to me.” She climbed down off her stool and hunted through the DVD collection stacked on the shelves behind the counter. Fortunately, she was tall and could reach all of them. I couldn’t have reached without a stool.
“So, what have you heard lately about Henry’s hit-and-run?” I asked.
“The wheels of justice grind slowly,” she replied as she ran a finger over the movie case titles. She grabbed the correct DVD and turned back to me. “Frank said that the police traced all of the vehicles that he and Judy ever owned, but didn’t come up with anything. Now they’re combing through all the driveways and garages in town, looking for a green pick-up truck. See, the police found some green paint scraped onto one of the studs at the crime scene, so they’re thinking the vehicle that did it was green.”
“Makes sense,” I said with a nod.
“Yeah. Erna rushed right over as soon as she heard, and we wracked our brains over who owns a green pick-up, but we couldn’t come up with anyone. I have a theory, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I think that the hit-and-run driver isn’t local.”
“Really? How come?”
“Well, how do we know that it wasn’t someone from Calgary, say? Henry might have blamed Frank to shift suspicion from some unsavoury part of his life that we don’t know about – yet.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe Henry is involved with illicit drugs and owes money to a gang. Maybe some thug tried to rub him out.”
I smiled. I couldn’t think of anyone less likely to be tied up with the drug scene than Henry. “That’s pretty imaginative.”
“Well, who knows? Or maybe it was a woman. You know how they say ‘cherchez la femme’ whenever there’s a murder, or an attempted murder, in this case.”
“Gee, May, there’s got to be a better way to kill a man than driving a truck through his restaurant.”
“Yeah, but that’s what we’re supposed to think. Of course, anyone who did that had to be a psychopath. A psycho is probably the only kind of woman who’d be attracted to Henry in the first place.”
I laughed. “Poor Henry. First this happens, and now he’s got you speculating about his love life.”
May tapped her nose. “Between Erna and me, we’ll figure it out. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Maybe you two should open your own private detective business. You could run it out of the store.”
“Well, if I ever retire, I may just do that.” I handed May a $10 bill and she handed me back my change.
“Thanks for the news, May. I feel a lot better now.”
“That’s good. A little juicy gossip always cheers me up. Enjoy your evening.”
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“You, too,” I said before heading out the door for home.