6 - The Eye of the Virgin: Ike Schwartz Mystery 6 (2 page)

Chapter Two

“What have we got?” Ike Schwartz, Sheriff of Picketsville, at least until the election in November, followed a gust of damp March wind into the sheriff’s department and glanced at his watch. He pushed the door shut. Eight-thirty, not too late, all things being considered. He filled his coffee cup at the credenza behind the booking desk, added creamer and sweetener. He turned his gaze on his dispatcher, Essie Sutherlin, recently married to Billy and more recently with child, as the Bible would delicately put it.

“Looks like we caught us a B and E and a homicide, Ike. Not too shabby for a Friday night in March.” Essie sat enthroned behind her desk, regally pregnant, and glowing as only first time expectant women can. “Must be the Ides of March, huh? Wasn’t that when that old emperor, Jules somebody, bought it from his buddies?”

Ike grinned and nodded, and gestured toward her obvious bump. “Not quite, the ides will be the fifteenth, middle of the month, the fifteenth day of March, May, July, or October; otherwise the thirteenth day of the other months, but only in the ancient Roman calendar, which was different than the one we use now, of course.”

“I knew that.” Essie said, eyes wide and ingenuous.

“Naturally. Picketsville High is known for its classics curriculum, Anyway, you’re close enough and it was Julius Caesar—like the salad—who, as you say, bought it. How’s junior behaving today?”

The progress of Essie’s impending motherhood had displaced the usual office gossip. The jury was still out on whether that qualified as an improvement. A little bit of chat about massive hormonal shifts and morning sickness went a long way. But then, a preoccupation with deer hunting and NASCAR standings did, too, so he’d go along with prenatal physiology for a while and hope the work at hand would engender some new conversational opportunities. And for that reason, he welcomed the news of a homicide.

“He’s growing, Ike. The doc says I might have me a bruiser. Ma, that’s Billy’s momma, says all her boys was big so she’s guessing this one will top out at eight or nine pounds, too. Scary, ain’t it?”

“I reckon it must be and by God would be if I were the one carting around the future of the Sutherlin clan. But, as it happens, it is not an area about which I have much in the way of working knowledge. Who took the calls?”

“Which one?”

“Either. Start with the homicide.”

“Frank caught the homicide and Billy the breaking and entering. Their write-ups are on your desk. Today is a shift change so they will both be back in an hour or so.”

Ike headed to his office and the reports. He had difficulty making out Billy Sutherlin’s scrawl and set that report aside against the time he’d get the details in person. Frank Sutherlin, Billy’s older brother, had a neater, almost feminine, hand, if there was such a thing. In this era of correct, that is to say, mind-numbing conventional thinking, he wasn’t sure. He read the report and scratched his head. This one would be a poser, no doubt about it. He fetched another cup of coffee, put his feet up on his desk, and stared unseeing through the glass windows that separated his office from the rest of the area.

A body deposited in the urgent care center. Why would anybody go to all that trouble? Why not dump him in the woods like everybody else? Something screwy here.

***

Frank and Billy Sutherlin did not, as a rule, pull the same shifts. Ike initiated that policy after his first year as sheriff and after a viewing of
Saving Private Ryan.
It was probably an overreaction and didn’t work in practicality, but he liked the concept. Major crime was not a big concern for Picketsville, but the chance that there might be a situation that could go south in a big way always hovered in the back of his mind. There’s been one near miss the previous summer. He did not want to face Dorothy Sutherlin and have to tell her another one of her sons was dead, much less two. She’d lost one of the twins already in Iraq and except for her youngest, all were in professions that put them in harm’s way. But this weekend, Amos Pettigrew, who preferred night work, called in sick, and Billy, eager to pile up compensatory time against the day his child would be born, volunteered to take the shift. Now, both brothers sat across from Ike blowing on their coffee and looking bleary-eyed. Since the time they had entered the office, the ambient aroma had shifted from that of burnt coffee to something closer to that of wet leaves. A modest improvement he thought.

“So, Frank, we’ll start with you. I read your report. I have the details. Just give me the sense of it.”

Frank Sutherlin screwed up his face in concentration. “Hard to figure, Ike. We’ll have to wait for the ME’s report, but the guy on the scene last night…By the way we were lucky to find someone as quick as we did to come out from the ME’s office, or one of us would have had to camp out all night with the stiff—sorry, the victim. Anyway, the guy from the ME’s office said our shooting victim looked like he’d been shot with a small caliber weapon under the arm. I wrote that up but either it was a light load or it hit bone because we couldn’t find an exit wound. He guessed the bullet might have severed that big blood vessel in the chest.”

“There are two, if I remember my freshman biology right. One is the vena cava, or some such, and the other is the aorta.”

“Yeah, that last one I think he said, and then the guy bled out. Best guess, that would be the cause of death, doc says. It looked like whoever he was had been shot someplace else and then the person who shot him changed his shirt and put an oversized jacket on him before he was dumped in the clinic.”

“Nobody saw him brought in?”

“Apparently not. We quizzed all the staff and everyone we could locate, but nobody could remember seeing him come in or even noticed him after he got there. The staff was run ragged by a bunch of sick scouts and a mini-flu epidemic. Most of the people I talked to assumed he was a parent of one of the patients. But, like I said, there’s a bunch of people we couldn’t question last night.”

“Will you have any trouble finding out who all was there?”

“No. We have the names from the admission forms. Addresses too. We should be able to interview them all pretty quick.”

“It brings up the question, though, doesn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Why would anyone go to all that trouble? Why not leave him in an alley or a parking lot?”

“It’s a poser for sure.”

Billy sipped his coffee and made a face. “Maybe whoever did it hoped that the hospital could do something, like, after the fact. You know, an accident, shooter feels guilty and brings him in but is afraid to stick around. Sort of like a denial thing.”

“It’s a stretch but, okay, maybe. We’ll have to wait for the ME’s final report. Either way we have a homicide. You wrote there was no identification on the vic. Was there anything to tell us who he was or why he was here? I gather he’s not local.”

“Nothing, Ike, no wallet, no cards, no receipts, nothing. Nobody knew him, you know. Out-of-town person, it seems.”

“We have any finger prints?”

“They should be coming over this afternoon. I’ll have Samantha run them through her fancy computer program thing—AFIS.”

Frank had not yet been able to call Samantha Ryder by her nickname, Sam, although everyone else did and she’d asked him to more than once. Her main contribution to the Sheriff’s office was her computer skills. She made the television versions seen on
CSI
in its many permutations seem inept. Most of that stemmed from her ability to hack into nearly any program she wished to. Ike made a point of not asking how she did it or whether she was siphoning off information he’d otherwise have to pay for with a license fee. Picketsville did not have a large budget devoted to technology. Not in the sheriff’s office, not anywhere. Depending on the availability of federal subsidies, small towns were either annoying in their sophistication or they were in the electronic Stone Age, computer-wise. Except for Sam and her machinery tucked away in the back corner, Picketsville was Early Pleistocene.

“Let’s hope. I am, for one, not that eager to have a John Doe on my hands. Okay. We’ll have to wait. Okay Billy, your turn.

Chapter Three

“Straight up and down breaking and entering, Ike. This guy…” Billy consulted his notes. “Louis Dakis, came back from doing an evening class up at the college—”

“University now.”

“Tell me the difference. One day it’s Callend College for women. A week later it’s Callend University. What happened in a week?”

“Not weeks, months. Callend was, for a hundred years or so a college. It started as a ladies’ finishing school, very popular back in the day in this part of the world. Then, it evolved into a liberal arts college, but still only for women, and then last summer it merged with Carter Union, a business college, added a business school offering advanced degrees, and became coed. Because it has a school of liberal arts, a school of business, and now a separate school of fine arts, it qualifies as a university, which is usually defined as a collection of schools or colleges gathered in one place. Not always, however. Being called a university doesn’t mean what it used to.”

“Yeah, whatever, college, university, school for rich kids is what that place is. Anyway, Dakis says he comes back to his house and finds somebody busted a window and climbed in and ransacked a bunch of holy pictures he had stacked up in the dining room.”

“Holy pictures? What kind of holy pictures are we talking about here?”

“Like in them foreign churches. You know, lots of pictures of Jesus with his fingers crossed, Mary and the baby Jesus all pretty like only she looks like she’s wearing a football helmet, and other people, saints, I guess the kind of pictures that they hang up in them churches. Not like normal ones like you see in somebody’s front room,
Jesus Knocks at the Door,
and like that, but stiff and a little, you know, hard-looking. Like they know what you’re thinking. Can’t think why anybody would want a picture like that.”

“Icons?”

“What? Yeah, now that you mention it, that’s what he called them. But they didn’t look nothing like them little things on the computer screen so I didn’t pay much attention. But yeah, that’s what he said they were.”

“Any follow-up?”

“Crime scene techs came and dusted. Dakis took a quick inventory and said nothing was missing. Looked like somebody had knocked over a big bottle of nail polish remover. I asked him what he used it for because I didn’t see no sign of a woman in the place. He said he cleaned his brushes with it sometimes. Me, I’d a thought he’d be better off with turp or gasoline but he said no, the kind of paint he used to paint up them pictures, them icons, only dissolved in acetone, which, he said, is found in nail polish remover. He used water first and the remover only if the paint had dried before he could wash them. New to me.”

“You said he taught at the university?”

“That’s what he said. I didn’t recognize him, so I guess he wasn’t one of the regulars up there at the college.”

“I’ll call the school and find out. He might be adjunct. Since the economy’s gone south, they, like many places, are making do with part-time people where they don’t have to fund the fringe package, pay tenured professor salaries, and so on. He’s one of them, I’m guessing. Any luck on the prints?”

“Tech said the guy who broke in must have been wearing gloves. All he could find were Dakis’ prints and smudges on the door knob and some of the pictures. Dakis had a duck fit when he saw the tech dusting them. He said they were, like, valuable and they should be careful not to disturb the surface. I tell you what, Ike, some of them pictures was so old and chipped, and dirty, you would never have known if they messed with the surface or not. Who’d want to buy an old beat-up picture like that, anyway? I mean, they weren’t even painted on cloth like a real picture. I swear it looked like somebody went out to the barn and got him couple of old boards and slap-dashed a picture of a saint or something on it, then decided it weren’t much to look at after all and tossed it on the compost pile.”

Ike resisted the temptation to lecture Billy on iconography in general and the collectability of ancient icons in particular. “No accounting for taste, Billy.”

“You can say that again. Ma was telling me about one of them college professors that had a collection of dinner plates. Some all chipped and cracked. She said she, that’s the professor, a lady, kept them in a locked china cabinet. And Mrs. Pettigrew, that’s Amos’ granny, has a passel of cat statues that Amos says is insured for a bunch of money. Me, I’d take the money.”

“Right. Okay, you two take it easy today and try to stay awake. I don’t expect much will happen around here until later tonight and the Saturday night partying begins up at Callend and/or down at Eddie Knox’s Roadhouse, but still…Put a watch on Dakis’ house. Whoever was in there didn’t take anything, so maybe he was spooked before he found what he was looking for and left. If so, he might try again.”

“Say, Ike, maybe we could get us some adjunct deputies. You know, cheap help. Ain’t you got a slot open?”

“No, but I’d be happy to turn yours into one if you think it’s that good an idea.”

“Reckon I’ll get on my rounds. Oh, wait, there is one thing I forgot to mention.”

Ike waited as Billy scratched his head and pursed his lips. “It’s probably nothing but, you know the place smelled like nail polish remover and like I said, that has acetone in it, right?”

“If I remember my practical chemistry correctly, it does. And that is important how?”

“I noticed this guy had a couple of bottles of peroxide in the bathroom too. I seem to recall that bomb makers used them two ingredients with some kind of acid to make explosives. That’s all.”

“I’ll check it out. I don’t think that is where this is going, however…but you never know. You’re sure about the peroxide?”

“Billy rolled his eyes toward Essie and her Dolly Parton locks. “Oh yeah, I know all about that stuff.”

Ike dismissed them with a grin. What had Dolly Parton said? “You have to spend some real money to look this cheap.” When they’d cleared the office he lifted the phone from its cradle and dialed the university. He raised the president’s office. Agnes Ewalt, Ruth Harris’ secretary, answered.

Agnes Ewalt sat at her desk outside Ruth Harris’ office like Horatio at the bridge, screening her boss’ visitors and phone calls with a diligence bordering on compulsion. She was a stereotypical spinster who had spent the previous year trying to keep Ruth, as president of the then college, now university, and Ike apart. She seemed to feel it her duty to maintain what she assumed to be a respectable and necessary distance between town and gown. And the town’s sheriff, in her estimation, was the quintessential townie who needed to be kept at bay. She had failed in that, but her efforts had exacted a cost in the general area of aggravation. Since the fall, however, she had moved not quite one hundred and eighty degrees in her estimation of Ike, and now provided aid and comfort to her boss and the man Agnes insisted on calling her
boyfriend
against the as yet still hostile faculty.

“Sheriff, she has a visitor. I’m afraid I can’t disturb her short of an emergency. She did leave a message for you though.”

“That’s okay, Agnes. I can ask you the question I had for her. But what was the message?”

“Tonight, dash, dash, A-frame, question mark.”

“Got it. Tell her yes, and leave me a voice message telling me what she wants for dinner. Okay? Now, what can you tell me about a man named Louis Dakis?”

“He’s an adjunct faculty member. I know that. I think he joined this quarter, sort of at the last minute. The chairman of the Art Department had an FTE line in his budget open up and he knew his friend Mr. Dakis needed a place temporarily, so he brought him down.”

“FTE means full time equivalent, I assume. Down from where, exactly?”

“FTE—correct. Down from Washington, D.C., I think. He is something of an expert in his field, whatever it is, and the department thinks they have pulled off a coup. I don’t know. But anyway, that’s the story.”

“He’s an iconographer. Is that right?”

“You know, Sheriff, that sounds about right. Hold on a sec.” The line went silent and Ike thought he could hear paper rustling. “Here it is, in the supplemental catalogue. ‘Iconography 101’—you were right—‘a course which will explore the history of the icon, or holy images, as practiced in the East and the recent resurgence of interest in them in the West.’ There’s an optional lab offered, too. Let’s see, students will be taught the basics of icon making and will paint one for themselves. There’s a note attached in Dr. Harris’ handwriting that says the optional lab filled in two hours after the course was announced. My, my, imagine that.”

“Thank you, Agnes. You wouldn’t happen to have Dakis’ phone number and schedule handy, too, would you?”

“Phone number, yes. Schedule, no. But I’ll look it up and have Dr. Harris give it to you this evening.”

“Perfect. Thank you.” Ike took down the phone number and hung up. Question: why would someone break into an iconographer’s house, ransack the inventory, and leave empty-handed? Whoever it was had something else in mind other than to steal icons, but what? Perhaps Dakis came home too soon and he or she had to duck out before loading up. Maybe. Or the person was searching for a particular image and didn’t find it. He would need to talk to Dakis.