He opened his fist then. The little sock monkey was in it. Crushed a little in his grip, but there it was.
“I knew that story wasn’t true, about your daddy,” he said. “I knew it while you were telling it. But it being true or not, that wasn’t the point, was it?”
I smiled and shook my head. No no no, that wasn’t the point. And yes yes yes, too, of course.
Needless to say, I didn’t kill him. And I didn’t take my half and hit the highway.
When we got in the car the next day, I almost didn’t see the rust along the wheel well, and I closed the door so soft that I almost didn’t hear that loose metal rolling around inside. While Delwood packed the trunk, I slipped that pistol into the glove compartment, just like it had been in the first place. I didn’t touch it again.
As Delwood drove us along 66 and out of town, I rolled down the window and kicked up my heels a little, leaned over against him.
You might imagine that I was stuck on that $5000 painting in the trunk and that house ahead, and partly I was, but again you’d be missing the point. It was the sock monkey that meant the most to me. Light as a trinket but with a different kind of weight to it. When I hung it from the rearview mirror, the rattle there died down almost to a whisper, and it all seemed like a smoother ride ahead for a while.
The Seven Sorrows
by Terence Faherty
This month Terence Faherty gives us a new case for his first series character, Owen Keane, a sleuth the Indianapolis News called “metaphysical, thinking, introverted, self-effacing, ineffectual,” and “unlike any investigator to hit the mystery scene.” We rejoin Owen in 1995, fifty years from the end of World War II — an anniversary around which the story’s plot turns. Mr. Faherty’s latest book-length work, In a Teapot, features Scott Elliott, a P.I. who also frequently appears in these pages.
1
“World War Two officially ended on September second, nineteen forty-five. So this September will be the fiftieth anniversary. Last summer we started to run newspaper ads asking residents of Middlesex County to donate or lend us World War Two memorabilia for an exhibit. The response was tremendous.”
That was putting it mildly. The Middlesex County Historical Society had been deluged with donations. Either there was a sincere desire in this corner of New Jersey to honor the generation that won the war or a lot of people wanted to remodel their attics. The society had been forced to rent warehouse space a few blocks from its New Brunswick offices. And to hire additional flunkies to sort through the largess. I was one of those, and my new supervisor, Rachel Terman, was giving me my orders and a pep talk.
“It’ll be fun, Owen. A lot more fun than sitting behind a desk. You’re like an archeologist. Or a detective.”
That last inducement was ill-chosen, though Rachel couldn’t have known it. I’d played at being a detective way too often during my forty-odd years, which was one of the reasons I found myself in this barely heated warehouse on a January morning, working for little better than minimum wage.
Rachel was a small woman made a little less so by the bulky winter coat she hadn’t even unbuttoned. Small but brimming with organization.
“What we need for you to do is prepare the rough draft of a catalog. We want you to assign each box and bag a lot number and list the contents. Then we can get it all on the computer.”
She pointed to the nearest object, a wooden trunk in olive drab. “Let’s do this one together. Got your pad ready? This’ll be lot number one. The tag says it’s a donation, not a loan. It was donated by Mrs. James Petrone. It must have been her husband’s footlocker. See, his name is stenciled on it: Sergeant James G. Petrone. Okay, now we open it up, if it will open.”
It certainly wasn’t locked. There was a heavy hasp on the lid, but no padlock to go with it. On either side of the hasp were rusty latches, like the ones I’d had on my grade-school lunchboxes only much larger. Despite their oxidation, these opened easily. I lifted the lid, and Rachel let out a little gasp. Coiled on top of some neatly folded uniforms was a belt of ammunition. Every sleeve of the long canvas strip contained what appeared to be an intact round.
“Don’t panic, Owen,” Rachel said, though I hadn’t even joined in the gasping. “There’s a protocol in place for this. We were afraid there might be some live ammunition or even a souvenir gun mixed in with the donations. Don’t touch anything like that. The bullets could be unstable after all these years.”
She dug in her coat pocket and produced a cell phone. “We’re supposed to call the police so they can come and take it away. They gave us a special number.”
By the time that special number produced results, I’d gone through three additional boxes without finding any mortar rounds or hand grenades. Rachel had kept watch with me, though she’d spent her time on the phone, talking with someone back at the society.
The responders, patrolmen named Ryan and Wisehart, were big men dressed, as policemen often seemed to be, in uniforms a half-size too small for them. They immediately violated our protocol on not touching old ammunition. In fact, Wisehart, after hefting the belt and scratching at one of the rounds with his thumb, tossed the whole thing to his partner, squeezing another gasp out of Rachel.
“False alarm, Ms. Terman, Mr. Keane,” Wisehart said to us. “That there is dummy ammunition. The shell casings are real, but the bullets are just painted wood.”
“Thirty-caliber wood,” his partner commented. “Machine-gun belt. Must have been used in training or something.”
“Or something,” Wisehart repeated. He looked around at the stacks of boxes and bags that filled the big room. “Maybe you shouldn’t be calling us every time you make a find. Maybe you should collect the stuff into a corner or someplace.”
“An ammunition dump,” Ryan said. “Or a woodpile.” He dropped the belt back into the footlocker and shut the lid. Then he said, “Huh.”
“What?” Wisehart asked.
“The name on this, James Petrone. Wasn’t that the rosary guy?”
“Sure was,” Wisehart said.
Rachel asked, “The rosary-murder guy? Of course. I knew I’d heard that name before.”
I hadn’t. “I’m new in town,” I said. “Somebody got killed with rosary beads?”
“No,” Ryan said. “Shot. Shot and robbed. But the perp left a rosary on Petrone’s body. He’d stolen the beads from a church. Left them right on the hole he’d drilled through the old guy’s pump.”
Wisehart’s equipment belt groaned as he bent to look at the tag on the trunk. “Donated by the widow. Not very sentimental of her. If we didn’t already have a guy for the shooting, we’d have to give Mrs. Petrone another look.”
“She had an alibi,” Ryan said. “And no motive. I’d be looking at Petrone’s mistress, if I was looking.”
I said, “He was cheating on his wife? Isn’t that a motive for killing him?”
“It would be for my wife,” Ryan said, “but not for Petrone’s. She knew all about the chickie on the side. She knew about the previous five. Guess the old guy was a hound from way back. But the other woman now, she had a motive. Petrone ran through some money of hers. Told her he was investing it. Turned out, he made all his investments at an off-track betting parlor.”
“Bad ones, too,” Wisehart said. “But the mistress also had an alibi. And she’s not suddenly donating her keepsakes.”
“As to that,” Rachel said, “the donation was set up last summer.”