A Merry Branson Murder Read online

  Someone started honking their horn behind me. The light had turned green. “Okay! Okay!” I said, I flapped a hand at them and pulled off.

  Then I thought, how did she get into the house with the killer in the first place?

  That I might just be able to find that out.

  I sped up and headed back to the Dallasandro’s place. I was hoping what I needed had been recorded.

  In a notebook.

  Chapter Nine

  “I heard that you beat up Clover and Coffey Carling.”

  I was standing at Andie Halliwell’s front door. I knew that he kept an eye on all things Neighborhood and hoped he’d seen Blu. I was ambivalent about coming to speak with him – I needed to find out information he had, but knew at the same time I’d have to deal with his curious disposition. Now with that coming out of his mouth before even a “Hello,” I wasn’t sure I’d be able to tolerate him long enough to find out.

  “Oh, is that Clover husband’s name?” I asked trying to change the tone of the conversation. “I thought it was Rolling Thunder.”

  He snorted and cracked a smile.

  “And no. I didn’t beat them up. I just moved out of their way.” I looked at him. He didn’t appear to look as menacing today.

  “What can I help you with?” he asked and pushed his glasses up his nose.

  It was late when I had gotten home after leaving Swan’s, and even though I had a plan, I knew I couldn’t execute it until the next day. So I had gone back to the house, taken Danger and Alfie out for a walk, and went to bed although I hadn’t gotten much sleep. From the time I left Swan, I’d spent most of the time with my mind on how I could approach Neighbor Andie and find out what he knew.

  I had decided he had to be my starting point.

  Maybe Andie had written something down in that notebook of his, not only about Blu getting into the house, but why someone thought people from Swan’s campgrounds being able to break and enter into the neighborhood home. But thoughts on how to approach Andie had left me agitated. I had taken a wrong turn on my walk and got lost momentarily, then had tossed and turned all night. I’d gotten up early, and it was hard not to pace the floor in anticipation of talking to him. When I thought it wasn’t too early to impose, I walked over to his house. He had opened the door even before I had the chance to knock.

  “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions,” I said. “About last night and things going on around here.”

  “What company do you work for?” he asked out of the blue.

  “What? Why? What are you talking about” I said. He’d caught me off-guard.

  I didn’t want to answer his questions, I wanted him to answer mine. And I wasn’t too sure he needed to know anything about me. It wasn’t that I was suspicious of the man. I didn’t think he was the murderer, or anything like that even if he was a little strange. He’d been too busy watching me to have had time to do it, which ended up making him my alibi. That was a good thing.

  I just didn’t want him knowing anything much about me because he was so nosey. And I knew that he didn’t mind sharing everything he knew to anyone who would listen.

  “Because,” he said, “I think you should divulge that information. Who you work for is critical.”

  “Critical to what?”

  “Critical to me trying to solve this case. And perhaps the things going on around here.”

  That answer surprised me.

  “Really,” I said. “You’re trying to solve the murder.

  “Yes. Really,” he said. “And I think your company has something to do with all the break-ins around here. Now maybe all their mischief may have led to murder.”

  “There’ve been break-ins?” Swan was right. I looked up and down the street as if I was going to see one going on as we spoke.

  “I wouldn’t have said there had been otherwise.”

  “Well,” I said. “I guess that’s why I was hired to ensure no break-ins at the Dallansandros.”

  “Not that it helped,” he said. “Because now instead of someone robbing the house, someone was killed in their home.”

  “I don’t think you finding out the company I work for has anything to do with you being able to solve the case,” I said ignoring his observation.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I already know.” He started closing the door.

  “Wait!” I said. “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “And you expect that I will answer questions for you without you answering any questions for me.”

  Ugh!

  “I work for a place called Harrington,” I said hoping that would satisfy him.

  He pushed his round glasses on his face, his mouth falling open. “Not Harrington House and Pet Sitters out of Collierville, Tennessee.”

  “One and the same,” I said, wondering why that information surprised him, he had just said he knew where I worked.

  “They are a crime ring,” he said.

  “No they’re not.”

  “Yes they are.”

  “No they’re not,” I said.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “No. They. Are. Not,” I said with emphasis on each word. “What do you know about them?”

  “As a member of the Neighborhood Watch Program-”

  “A job you take very seriously,” I said interrupting him.

  “A job I take very seriously,” he repeated my words and kept talking as if they had been his own, “I make it my duty to keep abreast of what is going on in the world of home invasion.”

  “Home invasion.” I repeated what he’d said and crossed my arms. Talking to him took a higher level of patience than I usually had first thing in the morning.

  “Worldwide.”

  “Okay.” I said. “You keep up with what’s going on with home invasion all around the world. So what’s that have to do with Harrington?”

  “Harrington has a reputation as being notorious for theft.”

  “That is not true,” I said.

  “Yes it is.”

  “No . . .” I threw up my hands. I wasn’t going to do that with him again. I switched gears. “I’ve never heard of that before.” I said to him.

  And I didn’t believe it. Not with all the rules Ava Dewey was always spouting off to me. And with her insisting I keep the “good name and reputation” of the company intact, I saw no way it could be true.

  “You should try reading the forum boards,” he said.

  “The what?”

  “You are aware,” he said, “that there are other things you can do on the internet besides shop.”

  “Ha. Ha.” I said.

  But I wondered how he knew I loved to shop. Although, he didn’t have it completely right. I didn’t shop on the internet much. I liked going inside the store. The bright lights, the shiny showcases and racks, to me, were all part of the allure. Shopping should invigorate all of the senses, and you just couldn’t get that feeling online . . .

  “Hello,” Andie said and waved his hand in front of my face.

  I leaned back. “What are you doing?” I said and swiped at his hand.

  “Your eyes had glazed over. Your mind had wandered. We are having a conversation here.”

  “Oh.” I blinked my eyes. “I know,” I said and shook my head trying to focus. “I was listening.”

  “No you were not.”

  Ugh . . .

  “You said I shopped online,” I said.

  “What I was talking about were the online forum boards.”

  “Oh right,” I said. Whatever those were.

  “Reddit is an excellent one,” he said. “You should check it out.”

  “It’s a forum board?”

  “Yes. And in a way you are right,” he said and pulled out his little notebook. He flipped quickly through a few pages then slowed down when he evidently got to the information he wanted to share. I saw his lips moving as he read, once he finished he looked up at me. “Harrington does not necessarily have a reputation
for theft, per se.” He glanced back down at his notes. “However, it appears that the homes surrounding the ones watched by Harrington employees have a higher percentage of being robbed than those that use other house siting services.”

  I hadn’t realized that house sitting was popular enough to have more than one company doing it. But his logic, and whatever he’d written down in that notebook of his, I was sure was wrong.

  “So,” I said, “that would mean that Harrington had nothing to do with the home invasions. They kept their clients’ homes safe.”

  “Or it could mean they were the perpetrators. Robbed all the houses around them, leaving the ones they were in untouched and them unsuspected.”

  I opened my mouth to respond to him, but then closed it again. I thought about Stalker Guy back in Collierville.

  He had tried to hit on me when I was out at a nightclub, then had tried to run me off the road when he spotted me in my little orange car later. He had been one of their employees and had been the one that told me about Harrington (before I’d flipped him in the parking lot for trying to force me to go with him against my will).

  He was a sleaze.

  And now thinking about it, I wouldn’t put it past him to do exactly what Andie was saying Harrington house sitters did. But Stalker Guy being capable of doing it didn’t make everyone that worked for the company a thief. I was sure Harrington ran background checks on their employees and a record of theft would have to preclude a person from being hired. I was certain about that too.

  “Are you here to rob houses?” Andie asked me before I could explain my logic to him.

  “What?” I focused back on him. “No. I’m not here to rob houses.”

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “In Branson?” I asked confused. “I’m here to house and pet sit.”

  “No,” he said. “Why are you standing at my front door?”

  “I told you,” I said. “Like five minutes ago, when I first got here, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought perhaps you wanted to thank me for helping you stay out of jail. I would have thought you would have come running to my door last night with deafening cries of gratification.”

  I had to keep from chuckling because I knew he was serious. “Thank you,” I said as sincerely and quietly as I could.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “Now on to business.”

  “Business?” I asked.

  “Yes. I am actually happy you stopped by. I was going to come over and speak with you this morning as soon as I finished my bowl of oatmeal.” He flipped to a clean sheet of paper in his notebook and pulled a pen from his pocket. “But since you’re here, we can go on and get started.”

  This guy jumped around from topic to topic like people hopped over hot coals. He was confusing me and I wasn’t able to get in any of my questions.

  “Get started?” I said and tilted my head to the side. “Uh. No. I came over here because I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “You do keep saying that. But I can’t promise I will answer any of your questions,” he said. “But I’ll make a deal with you.”

  “What is that?”

  “For everyone question you answer, I’ll answer one of yours.”

  I huffed. “Okay. Fine,” I said, all set and ready to pose a question to him. I had already answered a slew of his.”

  “And,” he said before I could say anything, “I’ll start.” He clicked the top of his pen. “Clover Carling hasn’t been over there asking you questions has she?”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I just want to make sure my investigation isn’t being compromised.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “How would Clover asking me questions compromise your investigation?” Then I thought about what he said. “Wait,” I said. “Which investigation?” I wasn’t sure if he meant the one about the neighborhood break-ins or the murder.

  “I’m conducting an investigation into the murder of the female found inside the house located at 36710 Orchid Tree Lane.”

  “You mean the Dallasandro’s house.”

  He just nodded. His pen poised ready to jot down anything I told him.

  “I see,” I said. Okay, so he was talking about the murder. “Shouldn’t you leave that up to the police?”

  Although I wasn’t one to talk. I had darkened his doorstep to start an investigation of my own.

  “I am merely conducting an investigation separately from them. My investigation will encompass the goings on around the neighborhood that may be relevant to the homicide that occurred,” he said. “Our city’s police officers have a lot of work. I am just doing my part as a concerned citizen.”

  “I see,” I said again.

  “Okay. Now let me see,” he said. “Back to my questions. Do you know why the decedent was inside the Dallasandros’ house?”

  The decedent?

  I laughed. He was asking the question that I wanted to know, but I knew I wouldn’t have posed it quite as he had. “I believe Blu James was her name,” I said.

  “I knew that,” he said but wrote it down in his notebook. “Just please answer my question.”

  “No. I don’t know why she was in there. But I was wondering if you knew how she got into the house?” I finally got to ask him a question.

  I was eager to find out how someone had gotten past me and into the house seeing that I was supposed to be watching it.

  He looked up from his notebook, pushed his glasses up on his face and stared at me for a moment.

  “No, I don’t,” he said then looked back down at his notebook. “But that is a good question.” He started writing.

  “She couldn’t have gone into the front door,” I said, seeing I’d grabbed his interest, I hoped he’d keep answering questions. “Do you know how else she could have gotten in?”

  “That’s true,” he said not looking up from his writing. “She couldn’t have gone in the front door. I would have seen her.”

  I just bet you would have . . .

  “Right,” I said. “And wouldn’t that mean the killer couldn’t have entered through the front door, as well? Because you would have seen him, too.”

  He stopped writing.

  I knew his mind was churning even though I couldn’t see his face, it was still studying the page he’d been writing.

  “And,” I added. “When did each of them go into the house? Separately? At the same time?”

  He finally looked at me. “They had to have gone in the back door,” he said. “Or in a window on the Carling’s side of the property.” He scrawled something in his book. “The former – going in the back door – would be quite difficult because the backyard is butted up against the back of the adjacent property on Shasta Place Drive. They would have had to have gone though that backyard and then this one, doubling their chances of being seen.”

  His eyes were sparkling like he had just found gold.

  “And the latter?” I asked. “Could they have gone in a window on the Carling side of the house?”

  “Not sure. I haven’t been on that side of the house in ages.” He glanced at me. “For obvious reasons.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “So the back door? Do you think the police know that?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t think they know exactly how anyone was able to get into the house,” he said. “I remember them saying that there was no sign of a break-in. Of course that doesn’t mean they hadn’t thought of it or ruled it out.” He flipped his notebook closed and reached for the door knob, pulling it shut behind him. “Just nothing conclusive on their part.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “If you’ll excuse me please,” he said not answering my question directly. “I have to go and check out the Dallasandros’ backyard.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”

  Chapter Ten

  I walked behind the short balding man and realizing we were both trying to do
the same thing, thought that for me he’d be an unlikely person to solve a murder with. Although, he was inquisitive and methodical, I just didn’t know if I could work with his little idiosyncrasies.

  He was sarcastic and evasive, and seemed to have an air of superiority about him. But right now he was on the same track I wanted to be on, so I followed hoping we’d happen on something that would help.

  When we got around to the backyard he went straight the door and stared at it.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone broke in here,” I said.

  “No it doesn’t.” He bent down and got eyelevel with it. “Then again, we’d already established that.”

  I glanced around, noting the windows of the house. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary – nothing broken or jimmied. Not that I thought I would since the police hadn’t found anything.

  “This lock is scratched,” Andie said.

  “That happens to locks when you put keys in them,” I said surprised he didn’t know that. “You don’t always get the key into the lock on the first try.”

  “I know that,” he said and stood up. “But what if they used lock picking tools? That would leave scratches and answer the question of how they got in.”

  “That’s possible,” I said. “Or they could have used a credit card, and the scratches are from a key. The Dallasandros’ key.”

  “A credit card?” he repeated.

  “Yep. You just slide it down the crack in the door.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “It’s just a suggestion,” I said.

  “Well okay. Because they got in here somehow,” he said.

  “Agreed,” I said. “And there were two people that went in.”

  “Of course,” he said. “She couldn’t have hit herself.”

  “But the question is, did they go in at the same time? Or did they both break-in, only at different times?”

  “Well of course they did,” Andie said. “Miss Blu James went in with her accomplice and they had an argument. He or she hit Blu and then retreated.”

  “Or someone could have caught Blu there and hit her to get rid of her as a witness because like her, they shouldn’t have been there.”