Prime Cut

The dark, luscious espresso ignited the perimeter of my brain. “Lots of people knew Eliot worked there,” I observed. “Marla told me the museum board wasn’t happy with Eliot’s performance. If she knew where he worked, so did the whole town.”

“Fuller thinks Burr broke into the museum, strangled Eliot, faked a robbery, threw Eliot’s body into the back of his pickup, and drove out to the unfinished sun room. There, Fuller claims, Burr stabbed his building contractor with molding, broke a piece of drywall over his head, and hung him up by his Samson-style gold locks. Supposedly, Burr then shot his contractor through the head with a nail gun. For good measure.”

I flinched and set down my cup. I thought back to my entry into the sun room, my confusion in trying to find the coffeepot, seeing Gerald’s body … “What about that hiker who supposedly saw Gerald? Do you know his name? I don’t believe you could see the body unless you were ten feet away from it.”

Tom shook his head. “The hiker called from the Open Space parking lot by the trailhead. He didn’t give his name. It could be a setup, Goldy. We always have to consider it. Although, with Fuller bucking for higher office, he might not consider it.”

“Has Sheila O’Connor come up with anything yet?”

“Sheila said Eliot’s neck and face were badly bruised when he was strangled. Glass in his scalp is consistent with one of the two breaks in the glass-fronted display cases at the museum. Time of death probably not too long after one A.M. The evidence that Cameron’s pickup was used to transport the body is pretty convincing, too.” He drank more coffee. “Looks like Eliot’s T-shirt snagged on a protruding piece of metal in the truck. A fragment of the T-shirt fabric is still in the back of the pickup. Plus there’s grease on Eliot’s face and clothing, very similar to the grease in the vehicle.” He sighed. “We have no way of knowing if somebody borrowed Cam’s truck. He always leaves the keys in it. And it’s been so dry, there aren’t tire tracks we could analyze. Sheila’ll know more after the autopsy, you know how that goes.”

I nodded and got up to fix us both more coffee.

The fax rang. Tom removed the wall of dishes surrounding the fax machine, pulled out the slick sheet, and perused it. He looked up. “Here’s the layout from the fence separating Burr’s property and the trail to Smythe Peak.” He slapped the smudged map of Blue Spruce next to the cluttered sink; I peered down at it. Most prominent was the Smythe Peak Open Space area, the two thousand acres that surrounded the mountain. All of the land had been sold to the county by the Smythe family. Cameron Burr’s property was marked with a rough rectangle. According to thick hand-drawn lines and numbers, the framed sun room was only fifty feet from Cameron’s fence.

Tom said, “Cam’s lawyer is going to want to know why a killer would strangle a guy, take the time and trouble to rob a museum, and drive the dead or near-dead guy out to his own house. Then the killer tortures Eliot or defiles his corpse with building materials, and shoots him with a nail gun? I don’t think so. You can be really drunk or really angry. To do all that, you couldn’t be both.” He shook his head.

I slugged back the espresso. “Cameron didn’t do it, I’m telling you. Yesterday Andre told me Leah Smythe—or somebody at the cabin—fired Eliot for sleeping with a model. Maybe they broke up.”

“So you think some skinny model killed big, strong Eliot? Then hung him up in Cam’s sun room?”

“Not necessarily.” I tried to think. “I’m just suggesting other people besides Cameron disliked Gerald Eliot. Take me, for instance, although I didn’t really want to see him dead. But there might be more to Gerald Eliot than Fuller wants to see. Did you have a look at the Homestead?”

Tom nodded. Before he could elaborate, the phone rang and he answered it. He murmured a couple of questions, took notes in his spiral pad, then hung up. “Interesting update. I’m going to heat muffins. Sound good?”

“Sounds great.”

“Okay, early yesterday morning the call came from Sylvia Bevans about a break-in at the museum. My team covered the call, by the way. I just hadn’t told you about it; it seemed so routine. Sylvia was beside herself, babbling about a missing cookbook.”

“Cookbook?”

He smiled and spread frozen cinnamon-raisin muffins on a cookie sheet. “Yeah, I thought you’d take some professional interest in the theft. Sylvia Bevans, of course, reamed us out, but good.”

“Oh, brother.” Now this was a scenario I could imagine. The much-feared, seventy-year-old curator of the Homestead Museum would have ushered the cops into the sacred precinct of her cluttered historical society office and puckered her already thin-lipped mouth in fierce and undisguised disapproval. One of her seemingly endless wardrobe of pastel linen dresses—lilac, lime, or pink—would have strained at mother-of-pearl buttons over her ample body as she indignantly demanded the authorities find the culprit immediately!

Tom cleared his throat. “Two of the glass-fronted display cases were smashed. Sylvia told us one cookbook was missing. Today, she’s screaming about four cookbooks being stolen. They were part of an exhibit. She didn’t realize they were missing at first, she was in such a state.” Tom chuckled. “Only one book was in her initial report, so now Fuller’s accusing her of insurance scam. She chewed him out, said the Homestead’s not insured ‘cuz the county’s too cheap to pay the premiums.”

I thought of the book in the evidence bag found at Cameron Burr’s home. “So have they found all four cookbooks?”

“They found one in Cam’s trash and a second one underneath drywall in the sun room. Sylvia’s up in arms about their historic value, but as far as we can determine, each is only worth a couple hundred dollars.” He peered into the oven. “They’ll keep looking, don’t worry.”

Thinking of poor Cameron in the backseat of the police vehicle, I rinsed out our cups and the doser, then ground more espresso beans. I asked, “What’s Fuller’s big push to nab Burr?”

Tom flipped off the oven light and straightened with a sigh. “He’s caught a lot of heat for the plea bargains, and he sees this one as easy. Plus the rumors about him trying for state attorney general have been getting stronger lately. This could be a high-profile case. He’d get a lot of press for being a crime fighter, that kind of thing.”

I measured the coffee into the doser, pressed the button, and waited for the espresso to spurt out. “Would they have to find all four cookbooks up at Cameron’s house for him actually to be prosecuted?”

Tom shrugged. “Fuller’s got a half-dozen investigators sniffing around the museum and Burr’s place. Our guys usually find everything. If they don’t, and Burr’s defense claims shoddy investigation, Fuller can argue that anything not found is excess evidence and unnecessary in prosecuting Burr.”

It was my turn to sigh. “So what exactly were these cookbooks?”

He peered at his notes. “The first one we found is American Cookery by Amelia Simmons. Famous for its johnnycake recipe, according to Sylvia. This one wasn’t the original 1796 edition— apparently the museum’s was a nineteenth-century copy—but someone donated it to the historical society, and they put it on display.”

Of course the Homestead would put a cookbook on display that contained the seminal recipe for Western Cooking 101. Johnnycake or Johnnie cake, also known as journey cake, had been slapped together and cooked over fires by thousands of folks coming out in covered wagons to Colorado and points west. When I’d served as a docent at the museum, I’d ushered many a class of Furman County fourth graders into the Homestead kitchen to make a cider version of the moist coffee cake.

“The other cookbook they found is a 1903 edition of The White House Cookbook. So we need to find a 1910 volume called The Practical Cook Book by one Elizabeth Hiller, valued in the range of sixty bucks. The fourth book is something called the Watkins Cookbook, from 1936. Worth fifty dollars.” He handed me a plate of muffins. “Watkins Cookbook? That’s not something Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick put together in his spare time, is it?”

“No,” I replied, “it’s not an English cookbook. And the sidekick was Watson, remember? Thanks for the treat.” I bit into the hot, sweet muffin and remembered the humble red spiral-bound volume with its battered cover and spattered pages. “The Watkins man came out to Western ranches once a year in his horse and buggy. After the invention of cars, he drove a Model T truck. He brought peppermint, vanilla, liniment, whatever ranch folks needed, including simple recipe-books put out by the Watkins company, based in Minnesota, but with a reach all across the West. Everybody loved to see the Watkins man come,” I said with a smile. “And every rural household had a Watkins Cookbook.”