Murder Trouble by Louis Trimble

Author:Louis Trimble [Trimble, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Phocion Publishing
Published: 2019-10-31T12:00:00+00:00

I followed Bart into the cellar. To establish a right to be there, I said, “I’ll show you where I found the wallet and stuff.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, show me.”

I pointed under the stair. “My theory is that the person who threw the stuff into the cellar didn’t come downstairs. He just opened the trapdoor, bent over, and tossed it down under the top step.”

He looked up at the steps and nodded. “Could be. But I don’t reckon many strangers’re going to roll rugs up an’ find this door by luck. And it seems to me if the body-snatchers had known of it they woulda sneaked the body down here instead of carting it off. This’d be a fine place to hide a body.”

I was surprised. Bart seemed to be able to reason. “Where,” I asked, “did you find the body?”

“The sheriff found it,” Bart said. “In a back yard.” That told me a lot; I said as much.

Bart fixed me with what I took to be a suspicious eye—probably he had learned it by correspondence. “Sure you don’t know?”

I assured him not only did I not know but I wasn’t sure that there was anything to this body story. And if there was, I said I had no idea how the body had got into a back yard, or anywhere else.

Bart’s placid eyes were fixed on my face. “Sarky thought an awful lot of that dog, too. Musta got hold of a dead squirrel. It was poisoned.”

I was glad I hadn’t bitten. But the rigmarole—Saarkinnen dropping an exit line about a body and leaving Bart to watch my reactions—told me I was still under suspicion. More so than before perhaps, now that I had married Eve.

“You said it was at the coroner’s,” I reminded him.

“Yep. He’s the undertaker too. Sarky’s giving the dog a real burial,” Bart said. “Besides, he ain’t sure it was a dead squirrel that poisoned the dog. It was Morozzi’s back yard where he found it.” He sucked on his toothpick and watched me without attempt to conceal it. He was looking for reactions, but he was incapable of being subtle about it.

“He thinks the dog was poisoned at Morozzi’s?” I asked.

“Well, it seems that way. That was where he caught this Dirkson fellow digging, out at Morozzi’s chicken ranch. So Sarky takes a spade and goes out there. Morozzi ain’t at home on account of he had to go to Lewiston, Mrs. Morozzi says. So she invites Sarky in as sweet as you please. She’s always making eyes at him.”

I remembered something. Hadn’t Morozzi mentioned that already there was a lot of gossip when he had asked me to forget the affair of the chicken-burier?

“Only at Saarkinnen?” I ventured.

Bart grinned knowingly and shook his head. “She likes ‘em all,” he said. “Morozzi, he’s gone a lot. But Sarky don’t fall for it. He ain’t done more’n smiled enough to get her vote for five years now—since she was big enough to vote. Anyway, she gives him permission to dig around her hen house.

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