Sidetracked
I was busy typing my memoirs when I got the call. A man from Lexington named Sam Straighter wanted to hire me. I decided to listen to his offer, since he was paying for the call.
“My son-in-law has disappeared,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, lighting a butt, “I don’t handle divorce cases.”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “This is a disappearance, not a divorce.”
“Just testing you. I get five hundred a day, plus expenses, mostly booze and broads. Can you dig it?”
He said he could.
I hopped the next flight out of L.A.
I found the mausoleum where Straighter said he lived and parked my rented T-bird at the top of the key-shaped driveway. The butler took one look at my dirty raincoat and fedora and shut the door in my face. “Try the servants’ entrance,” he advised. I didn’t mind much. For five hundred reasons, I’d have come down the chimney
The butler said Straighter would see me. He looked worried and red-eyed, like a man with troubles he’d like to forget. We had a drink. Then we had another. His chauffeur drove me back to the motel to sober up.
In the morning, I found the missing son-in-law.
He was in the pool. Someone had put rocks in his socks. I’d seen cases like this before. I was headed for the airport when Straighter overtook me. He promised me a five-hundred-dollar bonus if I’d stay. We drank to it. I woke up back at the motel.
Next morning, the butler confessed.
Not right away. “You were stealing the spoons and got caught, didn’t you?” I yelled, choking him with his tie. “Come on, admit it. You poisoned him, then you shot him eight times and stuck him in the pool. Come clean. You don’t want something like this on your conscience.”
I hit him with my shoe, and he confessed.
“That’s more like it,” I said, giving him a brandy. I had one myself. When I woke up back at the motel, it was dark out and the butler was gone.
They found him in the morning in a lettuce crate at Straighter’s produce warehouse. He’d been tossed and diced.
“Hmm,” I told Straighter, “there’s more to this than meets the eye.”
I questioned his daughter, Sheila.
“Where were you on the night of your husband’s disappearance?”
“Why, right here at home.”
“You’re lying, sister.”
She didn’t deny it. We had a few drinks and wound up back at the motel. When I woke up, she was gone but I wasn’t sorry. I hoped this case would last forever.
I started checking on the missing man, Clay’s, movements before the disappearance. He’d been to the bank to see about a loan. Hooper, the loan officer, didn’t want to talk. I got him in a full nelson and broke three of his fingers. He talked.
“He wanted the money to buy a chinchilla ranch,” Hooper gasped. “I can’t imagine why.”
I couldn’t find the ranch. It had disappeared along with the owner. This was beginning to look like an inside job. I was just getting into my car when a guy on a motorcycle tried to run2 me down. He succeeded.
When I got out of the hospital, I managed to trace him from the tire tracks on my forehead back to Louisville. His name was Cecil, just Cecil. He’d done time on the no last name charge. I found him and, after half an hour with my cast, he was glad to help me any way he could. The pieces of the puzzle were finally coming together.
Straighter was in the pool when I got back to Lexington. He was swimming. He looked surprised to see me.
“Surprised to see me, Straighter? Next time, don’t send a boy to do a man’s work.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. He looked scared.
“I mean you sicced that Cecil creep on me. By the way, Miss, you can step out from behind that cabana there.” Sheila appeared in a two-piece and a pout. “It’s all over, Straighter. I know what you’ve been up to.”
“Are you crazy, shamus?”
“No, but you are, Straighter. Did you really think you could get away with cornering the chinchilla market?”
Straighter looked at his daughter. “Looks like he’s got us, Sheila.”
“Not yet, he hasn’t!” She leapt at me like a jungle cat and beat me with the evening paper rolled up like a club. I was covered with ink splotches before I could pry her off me. By then, Big Sam had me covered with an ugly looking .45.
“Don’t do it, Straighter,” I warned. “It’s finished. Come on in, Sheriff.”
“Drop it,” said the sheriff.
Straighter dropped it.
“How did you find out?” Sheila demanded. The sheriff helped her up. She would probably walk again someday.
“Your son-in-law told me.”
“That’s impossible!” Sheila said. “He’s dead. You found him in the pool, right here.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. It was very clever of you to pretend that the body was James B. Clay—and you had his widow, so-called widow, that is, to back you up, too. If Hooper, the loan officer at the bank, hadn’t let it slip that his new assistant was missing, I’d probably never have known the truth.” Their faces reddened.
“Which is?”
“Which is that your son-in-law, James B. Clay, took off after ruining your Chinchilla scheme, and that’s when you called me into the case. You were afraid his true identity would get out and ruin your political career, as well. But what you didn’t know was that Braibak—yes, I know all about him—had only gone back to town. He must have really hated Jim Crawford to do that to him. And he must have been upset with you to leave the body in your pool, Strater.”
“But where is Braibak now?”
“Ask Sheila here, Sheriff. She knows where the chinchilla ranch is hidden. Braibak can’t be far off.”
“But who killed my butler?”
I grinned. “Strater, that’ll cost you an extra five hundred.”
© 2024 Rick Neumayer
“Sidetracked,” which won the 1979 Finish-the-Novelette contest and was published in The Louisville Courier-Journal, will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you like this one, I’d love to hear from you.