Chapter Twenty-Nine
Possibly distracted by the prospect of meeting Quincy tomorrow, it took longer for me to realize we were not on the way to my house or Clara’s after we left the dog park than it should have.
“Where are we going?”
“The Roger,” Clara said. “Orange juice for Ned.”
The Roger is short for the local store in the Jolly Roger grocery chain.
Being out on the highway, it’s farther away than Shep’s Market, the family-owned grocery in town. It’s also less popular with most of Haines Tavern’s residents than Shep’s.
It does have one advantage. It’s open on Sundays.
That still left a major hole in Clara’s motivation for this trip.
Her husband — who likes orange juice with his breakfast — was out of town and would not have breakfast at home for a couple more days.
We were crossing the highway and onto the service road named — rather ominously, I thought — Covert Circle.
The Roger anchored a few businesses in this highway outpost. The bank branch and dry cleaners were closed, but one other enterprise was operating.
“Oh, look,” Clara said with unconvincing innocence, “The Dailey Car Wash is open. We can stop by there after I pick up orange juice. Might as well, as long as we’re out this way.”
“Oh, brother. How transparent can you get? Is William Alsup there? Who told you?”
She chuckled as we got out of the van, leaving the windows partially lowered for the dogs, happily sacked out in a jumble in the back. “I have my sources.”
Clara wheeled her mini-cart directly to the orange juice as I trailed her.
With Ned’s favored brand on sale, she loaded up, then we headed to the front.
Clara pulled in behind another shopper in line for the lone checkout clerk. All but two of the self-serve registers were — as usual — covered with fabric hoods that proclaimed they were out of order.
It’s never a good sign when it takes twice as long to check out as it does to shop.
“Want to go back and look over the dog treats, while I stay in line?” Clara asked.
“You don’t think we bought enough at Zepke’s?”
A woman came up behind us with a loaded cart.
She was medium height, medium build, and in the vicinity of forty. Her features were even, her hair nicely styled, though its uniform dark color defied nature.
All that faded to the background when I focused in on her shirt. Its pattern consisted of stylized cat faces wearing big sunglasses. They covered the entire shirt. Despite the sunglasses, each cat appeared to be staring straight at me. Not in approval.
I don’t dislike cats, but this shirt unnerved me.
Clara, having not spotted the shirt, continued, “Can always use more treats . . . Though, you’re right. We should buy them at Zepke’s. Maybe those sprats.”
“Ew. As bad as they smelled in the bag, I can’t imagine them up close and personal. Not to mention post-sprat dog breath.”
A harried-looking young woman wearing the black vest that identified employees went to the register next to where we stood and unlocked it. The light over the register went on.
The cat-shirt-wearing woman behind us backed up her cart in preparation to swing it over to take the first spot in the new line.
In a nifty bit of maneuvering, Clara shot her cart in ahead of her and stopped.
Cat woman’s cart turned to the side, possibly in a maneuver to go around Clara, but I was still standing there.
A fact the woman didn’t notice or didn’t regard. She hit my hip with the cart.
My oof was covered as Clara looked back at the original line and said to the middle-aged woman who’d been ahead of us, “You were here first, would you like to come over to this line?”
“Thank you, dear. I do appreciate your being fair and polite, but it’ll be my turn in a moment and you have so few things, while others—” A dagger look at the cat-shirt woman’s cart. “—have a lot. You go right ahead.”
“Thank you. That’s so thoughtful of you.” Clara smiled back at her and rolled to the register, ostentatiously not looking at the line jumper.
* * * *
Clara had a few things to say about the rude cat-shirt woman, but her mood lifted as she parked near the door into the car wash.
The dogs stirred, looked around, decided this wasn’t food or fun and went back to sleep.
I followed Clara into an area with seats back-to-back like at an airport gate. One side faced large windows that showed a car advancing through the wash, the other side looked at the parking lot. Hard to know who had the worse view. An employee in a jumpsuit was behind a tall desk straight ahead.
“Hi. Where’s William?”
Clara’s assurance and easy manner had the young guy immediately pointing over his left shoulder. “Down the hall. If he’s not in his office, might be outside. You’ll see the door.”
We did.
We also saw a man whose size matched the shadow we’d seen outside Zepke’s Thursday night.
Presumably William Alsup, since the door from outside was closing and he was entering a small office with that name on its door.
“William Alsup,” Clara said with no question to it. “I’m Clara Woodrow, this is Sheila Mackey. We’re here about Damon Swindell.”
His jawline was the same width as his neck, reminding me of the Muppets character Beaker, though this guy’s nose and hair weren’t orange.
He had an unusual resting expression. It was like he wanted to pout, but he’d disciplined his lower lip not to protrude, while his chin didn’t get the message. It pulled up and back, making him look like he was going to cry or whine any second.
“What about him?” His voice had a touch of whine to it, too. He sat behind his desk. “Heard he’s dead.”
Not waiting for an invitation, Clara and I took the two chairs on its opposite side.
Clara started, “As a fellow local businessperson—”
“He was no businessperson. He was a crook, a con, a felon who hadn’t been caught yet. Don’t tell me you fell for his spiel, too?”
“Us? No, we—”
“Then you’re more fortunate than other people, including a neighbor of mine.” He snorted. “Did you hear about Swindell’s craft beer deal? I see from your faces you didn’t know about that.”
I didn’t think we’d shown any response.
“Long story short, he was pulling in investors for what was supposed to be an expansion to this area of a craft beer operation from North Carolina. Turns out he had no connection to that operation, was coat-tailing on the name. A neighbor of mine did his due diligence, but it wasn’t until lawyers got involved with discovery and such that he could see all that was going on.
“And then the—” He audibly swallowed whatever word he’d intended to use.
“—turned around and started suing my neighbor and a couple others, saying they were spreading falsehoods and injuring his good name. Good name. As if he ever had one. More they dug, more they found out. Bankruptcies, defaults, fraud . . . It was like he thought he could do whatever he wanted, that the law didn’t apply to him.
“And you know what else?”
He didn’t wait to see if we did. “It wasn’t real craft beer. It was cheap stuff he ran through machinery and repackaged.”
“So, you’re not unhappy he’s dead?”
Clara’s wide-eyed innocence didn’t completely work on him. He became more cautious.
“Wouldn’t say that. My neighbor was telling me this morning it’s made things worse.
Complicated the legal efforts. They were finally making progress on Swindell’s shifty moves putting money into foreign accounts and layers on layers of LLCs — sophisticated and complicated.
Now they’ll have to sort out with the lawyers if the widow has financial vulnerability — another whole level of hell. ”
Leaving Clara to continue being the friendlier face, I stepped in with a harder approach.
“As much empathy as you might have for your neighbor, you had other issues with Swindell, didn’t you.” I didn’t make it a question. “Your family’s car wash business and—”
He cut across my words angrily. “That’s no secret. Trying to bring in an out-of-town corporation to undercut us, to drive us into the ground. Typical of his slimy behavior. We’re fighting it and we’re winning.”
“And beyond your family business,” I said, as if he hadn’t interrupted, “a more personal issue.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking—”
“Your wife.”
Silence dropped hard on the small office.
“None of your business,” he snapped.
We waited, watching him.
He looked away from us, toward the door. Perhaps unconsciously wanting to escape, but not moving.
“Not saying anything else to you except I’m not going to lie and say I’m sad the bastard got murdered. He was crooked to the core. Deserved whatever he got. But I sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with his dying.”
We weren’t getting more out of him.