Chief Sturgis was stepping out of his own pulled-over police vehicle as they rolled up. Pushing retirement age hard, the beefy six-footer had a gut challenging the bottom buttons of his blue uniform shirt and two bushy white eyebrows that mimicked his old-fashioned white handlebar. He had big dark blue eyes and an endless smile in a walrus face, the kind of cheerfulness cops grew if the daily tragedies in this work didn’t defeat them.
Next to Sturgis was a fit-looking Hispanic uniformed officer with a military bearing — that was the kind of haircut you got at an army base — and steady dark eyes in a deceptively boyish face. Cutter didn’t know the officer, but the Timber Lake chief — after shaking hands with his visitors — introduced the younger cop as Sgt. Harry Lopez.
“First thing I gotta tell you, Chief Cutter,” Sturgis said, as the four cops grouped between the two cars parked along the wire fence, “is we haven’t advertised this thing. It’s not a cover-up, mind you, but we don’t need our little town getting a black eye.”
“Understood,” Cutter said. “We’re dealing with a tricky situation ourselves in Peachtree Heights.”
“I heard rumbles, but just rumbles.” Sturgis’s hands rode his hips, his right above the butt of a big revolver. “How much do you know about Timber Lake?”
“It’s along the river on one side and the lake on the other. It used to be a lumber town but that was a long time ago. A textile mill went belly up a while back. That’s about it, I’m afraid.”
Sturgis’s eyes narrowed. Good-naturedly accusatory, he said, “You’re not a Southern boy, I understand. You’re one of those flatland foreigners.”
Cutter grinned. “You’ve been misinformed, Chief. I was born and raised in Georgia. After the war I landed a job in NYC and spent a lot of years there. Lost my accent, I’m afraid.”
“Won’t hold it against you.” Sturgis’s head went back. “So you don’t know anything about the Lee family?”
“Not even Robert E.’s.” Cutter glanced at Janet. “Officer Hodges here said you were good enough to invite us down after she realized this might have something to do with the problem we’re facing.”
This being the building with a hole in its face.
Chief Sturgis thought for a moment, then gestured across the way. “Just around the corner, on the square, is a little coffee shop. Let’s take a short hike over there and I’ll fill you in.”
“Lead the way.”
They took a booth in back and a friendly gal in a pink uniform with a white collar brought everybody black coffee — not a sugar or cream in the bunch. Four tough coppers, Cutter thought.
Sturgis jumped right into it, like Andy Griffith selling breakfast food.
“The Lees,” he said, “were wealthy and influential for generations, going back to the lumber days. But the family fell on hard times or, if not hard times, easy times was damn well over. Zachariah Lee, right after the turn of the century, started a furniture business with what was left of the family loot... well, they started out with caskets and moved into furniture. Any event, they came roarin’ back. He and his wife Mildred had lost their fancy mansion on the bluff, but they lived like royalty on the upper three floors of that building you pulled up in front of, the one with the hole knocked into it.”
Janet asked, “They didn’t just build a fancy new place, with all that new casket and couch money?”
Sturgis shook his head. “No, ol’ Zachariah feared losing everything again, and even before that he’d been a stingy cuss. When the Depression come, he felt justified and let everybody know he’d been right to pinch pennies. And he was richer than God — a director of the lumber mill, owned pretty much all the downtown, including that block you’re parked in front of. Plus, he was the president of the Lee Savings and Trust Bank, which was not an institution known for its generosity of spirit.”
“Not much, then,” Cutter said, “for Christian charity?”
“Not hardly.” Sturgis sipped coffee. “Oh, Zachariah was a Christian all right, or least ways called himself that. But more an Old Testament-type Christian. Quit the Baptist church because it was too loose in its ways and started up his own sect. That died with him, I’m afraid, in the mid-’40s, during the war. People needed religion, but not such a harsh, unforgiving variety.”
Janet asked, “Any children?”
“Yes, him and Mildred, who looked like she walked out of that American Gothic painting, had three — two girls, who Zachariah ignored, and a boy, Efram, the youngest, who he adored. But Efram, who towed the line when his father was alive... kissed his butt, they say... had his own way of doing and seeing things. He was in high school when his daddy died and he inherited everything. Prided himself on a good head for business and handpicked the folks he put in charge while he went off to college in the east. Some say he bought off the draft board to stay out of the war, but people talk. Anyway, he came back with a law degree and a very beautiful bride, only she was an east-coast society gal, full of herself.”
Janet said, “Surely she didn’t want to live over a furniture store.”
“I don’t suppose so,” Sturgis admitted. “But one of those smart boys Ef put in charge of the bank kinda helped himself to unsecured loans, shall we say, and the bank went under. Folks knew Ef had been swindled and didn’t hold it against him. Anyway, it didn’t hurt his furniture business any. People were setting up house after the war and business was booming just the way babies were.”
Cutter said, “But not booming enough for the Lees to stop living over the furniture store.”
Sturgis nodded. “That’s probably so, though Efram wasn’t stingy like his papa, and they lived just fine. Traveled some. Cottage on the lake. That snooty gal of his, though, was a real social butterfly. Not that there was any ‘Four Hundred’ in Timber Lake... probably not even Forty. But Rosemary, that was her name, was a beauty and refined, and headed up every charity and such. They had one child, a girl, a pretty thing, but wild. She got herself pregnant.”
For the first time, the younger officer spoke. “Now that is just talk. Like the rumor Lula Lee ran off with somebody her parents didn’t approve of, or the sightings of her reported by vacationers over the years. But everything else the chief has said can be vouched for.”
Sturgis added, “And her folks always claimed their daughter married back east. If so, nobody remembers her coming back home for a visit.”
Janet said, “One rumor is true, anyway. The records confirm that Lula Lee died in childbirth. Her son was named Dennis. Do you know of a Dennis Lee connected to the Ryan family?”
“No,” Sturgis said, shaking his head.
“No,” Lopez agreed. “But... I think we’re at the next stage of our story.”
Minutes later they were again standing before the partially demolished row of weathered brick buildings.
Sturgis, gesturing to the Lee Furniture structure, said, “This block of buildings was condemned and scheduled for demolition about a month ago. The owner, retired attorney Efram Lee, had not been heard from locally, or anywhere else for that matter, for over a year, his little office shut down. And the furniture store had been out of business fifteen years.”
Indicating the building farthest left, Lopez said, “That partially demolished building was where the crew started, and early in the process the crane operator’s grip slipped and the wrecking ball swung too far right and punched that hole in the adjacent structure. A bad, stupid slip, but since that building was set to come down as well anyway, it wasn’t considered a big deal.”
“But as work resumed,” Sturgis said, “a stench rising from that accidental hole had the demolition crew refusing to work. They should have called us in, or at least put on masks before going in. But some wiseacres went ahead and battered their way in with sledgehammers and, for their trouble, got hit with a smell that cops like us know all too well.”