Murderers' Row by Dan Andriacco

Author:Dan Andriacco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: amateur sleuth, McCabe and Cody, modern sherlock holmes mystery, short story collection, Barbados, Hackleston's Cliff, murder, St Valentine's Day, wedding, Caribbean, Bajans, digital camera, panorama shots, Independence Day, parade, insulin, library, hypnosis, magician, Issue One, baseball, fireworks, Erin, hidden cameras, electronic surveillance, blackmailing, performance-enhancing drugs, gamma-Butyrolactone, guns
ISBN: 9781787056077
Publisher: Andrews UK
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

IX

My own phone rang a few minutes later while we were on the road, if you consider the Indiana Jones theme song a ring. It was Lesley Saylor-Mackie, SBU’s executive vice president and provost. If you don’t know what that title means, it means she’s my boss.

“You might want to batten down the hatches, Jeff,” she advised. “I just learned from Father Joe that the trustees are going to discuss an across-the-board tuition increase at their August board meeting.”

“That’s always a crowd pleaser. Well, at least we have time to work on messaging if they go through with it.” Not that any spinmeister could make that sound like good news. The best face on it might be something like St. Benignus University trustees have approved the first change in tuition for students since…

Saylor-Mackie checked on a couple of other irons she’d put into my fire in recent days, then disconnected. I mention this exchange to show you that a manager with a smartphone doesn’t have to be on-site to manage. So, I wasn’t really playing hooky that afternoon by tagging along with Sebastian McCabe in the Macmobile, a 1959 Chevy convertible the color of a fire engine and almost as big. We were on our way to see Roger Fleming.

A private pool on a hot afternoon in July is noisy, crowded, and pungent with the smell of chlorine. That’s where we found Fleming, for whom the Sunny Daze Swim Club was more than a summer job. He was one of four owners, all of them teachers.

Burley and bearded, topping me by two inches and maybe sixty pounds, Fleming wore ragged shorts and a polo shirt I would have passed up in my shopping at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store. We spoke with him just outside the club’s concession stand.

Mac had called ahead, so Fleming knew we wanted to talk about his confrontation with the late Gary Lobring at Vinyl, the record store where Lobring worked at the time.

“I was embarrassed by the whole thing—still am,” he said. “I blew my top. What kind of example is that for a social studies teacher?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “But I was frustrated by what happened at that open meeting, public forum, town hall, whatever you want to call it, about the idea of raising the library tax.

“It was a week before the end of the school year and the county commissioners were still on the fence about putting it on the ballot. Apparently, Jim Bridges thought an open meeting on the subject would drum up support for what later became Issue One. It seemed a good idea at the time, as they say. I gave my American Government students extra credit if they attended because I expected to hear a civilized exchange of views, with Jim answering reasonable questions from the public. But what happened that night was anything but civilized. Lobring just hurled a lot of insults at anybody who disagreed with his Neanderthal views.”

Isn’t that an insult?

“Bridges didn’t just take it, according to the press account.

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