April at the Antique Alley Read online

  Six P.M. made sense because the sign on the door proclaimed the shop would close at that hour. It would be assumed that the bad guy had lain in wait for the shop to close so he could do his dirty work.

  Detective Samuels, noting that the cash register was empty, asked Jill and I to estimate how much cash had been in the cash register when we left the store.

  Neither of us had any memory of Lola opening the cash register and I informed Samuels that I had handed her the cash out on the loading dock when we had first seen the desk. He had one of the crime scene investigators go through Lola’s pockets, and they found nearly a thousand dollars cash spread out in three or four pockets.

  Samuels asked me to take a look around and see if I could tell where the bad guys had searched. It was kind of weird. I mean the place was a mess, but it had been pretty much a mess when we had shopped there. It really did not look much like they had searched through the store front at all. I did open the door to the room my desk had been in and reported to Samuels that it was empty and there had been

  several pieces of furniture there the day before. Of course, I also mentioned to him that the desk I had bought had been out there in the back room, and not on the sales floor.

  A young cop interrupted my report to Samuels to tell him that several of the other stores in the neighborhood had security cameras outside so there would be a chance we could see something about who had entered the store last, but that Lola had no cameras either outside or inside.

  I was over by the cash register looking through things when I noticed that the sewing basket Lola had put my business card into was missing. I explained to the detective the joke Lola had made about it being her backup system. Of course being the professional he is Detective Samuels probed deeper wanting either me or Jill to completely describe the sewing basket and its contents but what can you say when you truthfully do not remember. I mean I could estimate the size and I was pretty confident about that, but when he asked what color it was neither Jill or I could conjure up an image we were comfortable with. In addition, I clearly remember that the cards were not just tossed loosely into the basket. She had some sort of tray in the basket that was the right size for holding business cards but I could not remember much about what type of tray it was or even if there was a single tray, or more than one.

  By now there were about a dozen crime scene technicians crowded into the store all photographing or dusting or measuring and we were in the way. Eric Samuels, Jill, and I stepped out the front door of the shop to find a small crowd of people gathered there. It was time for the shops in the area to open for their day of business and many of the shop owners and employees were curious about what was going on.

  The cops had brought an ambulance with them but there were none there needing medical attention so the vehicle was converted to a hearse. We watched Lola’s body bag being loaded into the ambulance, remorseful like she was a dear longtime friend, even though we had met her just half a day ago.

  As soon as the ambulance took off Eric Samuels addressed the assembled crowd and announced Lola’s death. He told them all that the best thing they could do was just open their shops as if nothing had happened and go on with business as usual. He did implore them to cooperate when the detectives came by to ask questions and promised that they would do so with the intention of causing as little disruption to their businesses as possible. There were several quick questions about when the funeral would be and Samuels had to tell the crowd that he would get word to them when he had that information.

  Someone in the crowd asked if it was safe for them to open for business and to appease them Samuels told them he would have extra patrols in the area for a few days. With that the crowd slowly dispersed.

  It was a beautiful Sunday in April in north Texas with the temperature already above sixty and headed for the mid seventies. There were light clouds in the sky but no forecast for any rain, which meant it would have been a perfect day for two young ladies like Jill and myself with a little money in their bank accounts to go treasure hunting at the southwest’s largest flea market. Instead Jill and I spent most of the afternoon sitting at the messy table in the police department lunch room with a very frustrated sketch artist.

  Our assignment was to describe for the artist the other pieces of furniture that had been out on the loading dock with my desk. They seemed to be the only things missing other then the card file in the sewing basket, so they were the only real leads the cops had to go on until after the finger print analysis could be completed and until all the outside security footage could be gone through.

  The artist was frustrated because his usual assignment was to construct a face from an eye-witness description and here he was drawing old furniture instead. To complicate things Jill and I did not turn out to be very good witnesses.

  We started with a serious discussion about how many pieces there had even been. I could clearly remember about six other pieces and vaguely remembered what some of them looked like. Jill remembered eight pieces other than my desk and her memory about the other pieces seemed clearer than mine. Complicating this even more, there was one specific piece Jill and I both clearly remembered, but I remembered it being on one side of the room and Jill insisted it was on the other side.

  Here we sat each holding a cell phone capable of taking digital pictures and it would have been so easy to simply snap a few pictures of the room while all the furniture was there, but why would we have done that? Eventually though we, with a lot of help from the artist, described four of the pieces with enough detail to pretty much identify them, and we also constructed a map of where the pieces had been in the room at the time we had seen them.

  Later, while Jill was still haggling with the artist I snuck away and ended up in Eric Samuels’ small office having a private conversation with him. He told me that they were having trouble finding anyone who could be considered next of kin.

  Lola’s body would go through an autopsy and then be cleared for final preparations but to whom he had no idea. He also gave me a printout of the last two weeks from her computerized address book and asked if I could go through it later and see if I recognized anyone on it. I folded up the three page report and shoved it into the back pocket of my jeans. I asked if there was anything I could do to help out and he sternly told me that it was a police matter and that they could handle it without the interference of a snooping private eye, but then almost in the same breath he

  suggested that someone might need to talk to other shop owners to find out if they knew the woman at all so that they could get started finding her family. I did tell him I would be happy to speak with them. He thanked me and also asked if I would check with them about any breakins or robberies they may have suffered recently.

  I gathered Jill up and we headed back to the Antique Alley for what would be the last three hours of business on this Sunday.

  For the second time in twenty-four hours Jill and I walked into Parnell’s Prize Antiques. The shop owner turned out to be Parnell Erickson. Tall and thin looking about thirty years old but probably a little older. His hair was just too black. It was obviously died and well kept, but he either didn’t dye his eye brows or they grew way to quickly because they were laced with a lot of gray. His vanity though was not in question. His shop was neat and clean and he obviously worked hard to keep it that way. His treasures were mostly Victorian furniture that had been severely refinished and polished to a very high sheen. The furniture was still lined up in rows but the rows were not as crowded as the other shops owners kept them. He probably didn’t sell more than one or two pieces each day but the profits on them more than made up for the low volume.

  Parnell was flamboyantly gay and did nothing to hide it which was quite O.K. with me. He was one of those people who never apologized for himself and if anything he did made you uncomfortable it was simply your problem, not his.

  As soon as we introduced ourselves and our purpose he immediately let us know that he considered himself to be
one of Lola’s closest friends. If we could believe him, he and Lola would have coffee and pastries each morning half an hour before the shops all opened. He questioned us on the funeral arrangements which we had no answer for. He reported no recent breakins to his store but told us that there had been at least one other recent breakin he had heard about and that was only about a week ago at the store called Uptown Treasures which he said was three or four shops down the alley.

  When I questioned him about Lola’s next of kin he could give me no help at all. Jill asked him what he and Lola would talk about each morning when he and Lola would share coffee. He told us that Lola spoke mostly about current events and steered clear of any nostalgic trips down memory lane. To him she seemed to always be living in the present and looking to the future which seemed odd to him seeing as how everyone on the block made their living dealing with furniture from the past.

  He continued by telling us that Lola would never discuss politics but seemed to be current on local news that was more gossip than fact. He said she could speak

  for hours about growing flowers, but also pointed out that there were no flowers in or around her store.

  He had a modern security system including several cameras and willingly handed over a video disc that should have covered the time period in question. We did not watch any of his video at that time, we just collected it with a promise that it would be returned at a later date. I gave him one of my cards and he gave me one of his.

  Parnell’s was the store just east of Lola’s Attic. Our next target was the building just to the west and it was called simply Antiques of Dallas. Where Parnell had focused on low volume high quality; this store was exactly the opposite. It was quite massive for a used furniture store but all I saw was a couple of acres of dusty junk.

  The proprietor was one Fredrick Smith (no relations to yours truly but like every other Smiths on the planet we joked about the commonality of our names) who greeted us with a big smile and called himself the “Mayor of Antique Alley.”

  His disposition changed though when he found out that we were not customers, but rather we had been pressed into service as investigators of the crime which had occurred next door to one of his fellow business owners. It is not that he was cruel or mean or rude, it was simply that once he figured out that we were not prospective buyers of his junk he simply had no further need of us. He impatiently listened as we requested information about Lola and quickly told us he did not know her very well at all. He told us his store had suffered no breakins at all and said that he had not heard of any from the other business owners in the area. He quickly pointed out two security cameras both on the inside of the store and both pointed directly at the cash register. He told us they were both fakes that were not hooked up to any recording device and were only to fool would be thieves.

  The self appointed Mayor Smith had no information at all about where we might find one of Lola’s family members. He asked me if I knew what was to be done with Lola’s estate. He was interested in not only the left over treasures but her building as well. I, of course, had no information to share with him other than to tell him it would all be tied up as evidence for a while.

  One of his mayoral duties was to complain about the crime scene tape and let me know that Sunday was their second most important business day of the week. He stated that he was quite sure Lola would not wish her death to interfere with the business that needed to continue along Antique Alley. I do not know if I had grown to like Lola or simply grown to dislike Fredrick Smith from his whining about her brutal death possibly having a slight effect on his balance sheet, but I was about to take a swing at the guy when his son saved him.

  Donald Smith walked into the room and immediately all attention fell upon him. It was not his fault, it was just the way Mother Nature had crafted him. He was a full two inches taller than me which put him at six feet five inches. He was dressed in black motorcycle leathers with lots of silver chains. His face under the helmet was that of Paul McCartney and when he pulled the crash hat off George Harrison’s hair tumbled out. He had a twenty-four karat smile and a three karat emerald in the ring on his left pinky.

  I took a deep breath and heard Jill let out an audible wanton sigh. He was either polite or deaf because he made no comment about her little lust noise.

  Perhaps the boy had grown use to hearing such audible gasps from females upon his arrival.

  Fredrick introduced Donald as his son and we quickly brought him up to speed on the recent events. I swear I saw a small tear roll down his cheek when we spoke of Lola’s death.

  His handshake was fierce and he made sure to tell both Jill and I that he was twenty-seven and single. He claimed to know Lola, but he too had no ideas about how we might contact next of kin. He told us about the one breakin we had heard about from Parnell. I am sure Jill and I would have stayed and chatted for a good deal of time but Donald excused himself so that he could head for home and we had little more use of his father so we moved on to the next store.

  Next door to Antiques of Dallas was a store called Buy It Bare. This shop differed from the other antique stores in several ways. They were trying to tap a new market of do-it-yourselfers, so what they did was sell only wooden furniture, and no matter what shape the piece was in when they bought it, they would strip the wood of its finish. Then, rather than refinishing it like so many of the other stores would do, they simply sold it stripped down. That way the customer could pick out the pieces they wanted, and finish them to match. The idea was attractive to the store owner because all of the pieces in the store would potentially match so a customer might buy several pieces instead of just a favorite find. In addition, the business of stripping and refinishing furniture was expensive and time consuming so they were cutting that process in half. To the prospective buyer the idea was attractive because the furniture all looked just like they wanted it to if they simply used their imagination. Additionally the furniture would be a little less expensive to buy. This meant though that their customers would generally be younger people, perhaps having their first antique buying experience.

  As soon as you walk into Buy It Bare you notice right away that the entire store has nothing but blond wooden furniture stacked everywhere, and then the smell hits you. The chemicals they use to strip the furniture are strong and have an

  odor. To most the odor is not necessarily a bad odor, but it certainly is a noticeable odor.

  I flagged down a tall blond woman who I expected was the store owner.

  Shelly Mizell was not quite as tall as me, and not quite as blond as me, and she also was not the store owner. When I introduced myself and my partner Jill, Shelly told us she was the store manager and that the store was actually owned by a small corporation and was the third store they had opened. The first one had been in Atlanta and was considered the flagship store. The other was in Houston. She had worked in both stores and they had picked her to open this third store up less than a year ago.

  There were no customers in the store at the time so Shelly took her time showing us around as she explained how the store worked. She claimed to not know Lola well. She, of course, knew who Lola was and recognized her by sight, but could not recall a single long conversation they had ever had. Eventually she took us in the massive back room of the store which is a work shop where they strip the newly acquired furniture of its varnish and paint. It was a smelly crowded room with several large fans blowing furiously, several projects in various stages of progress, and a man wearing a gas mask using a paint sprayer to wash down a kitchen chair.

  Shelly made enough distraction so that the man in the gas mask stopped his work, took off the mask, and spoke with us impatiently.

  Rubert Glaston (but usually called Ruby Glass) was a forty year old retired military type with hair way too long and shaggy. His army fatigues were well worn which one would expect for the work uniform of one in his profession. He was pretty old school. I mean he would never look you directly in the eye, but he stared ins
tead directly at my chest and made no attempt to hide it. He had to take the glove off of his right hand so that he could shake hands when we were introduced and he sort of did it like it was a big imposition to himself. Rough as he tried to appear I felt him quite harmless and to me at least it was quite apparent that he and Shelly were much more than co-workers. She obviously was the love of his life but his machismo would not permit him to show tenderness towards her when others were present.

  Once the mask and glove were off, and since he was taking a break anyway, Rubert quickly lit up a cigarette and I wished he would step a few feet away from the chemicals he was working with. Rubert knew nothing about Lola, and Shelly had to give him several clues before he even realized who had been murdered. He had a rather stupid look about him and one could not quite be sure whether it was the chemicals he constantly worked with or perhaps an over familiarity with Jack Daniels.

  Just west of Buy It Bare was a smaller shop called Uptown Treasures owned by a young lady named Jana Little. It was a name that fit her well as she was hardly Jill’s equal in height or weight. She told us she was thirty years old and had never wanted to be in the antique business but her parents had owned the store all of her life and just two years ago she had lost the pair to a drunk driver on New Years Eve. She had not had the heart to close the place but admitted she was losing money every month and would have to close it soon if things didn’t turn around.

  Jana claimed to not know the other shop owners well at all including Lola Martin preferring to keep to herself and could give us no help at all in finding Lola’s next of kin. When I questioned her about the breakin though we hit pay dirt. The story she told was exactly like the tale Lola had told us. Some guy had stopped with a truck loaded down with several pieces of old furniture and had sold the lot to her at a price so low she could not afford to pass it up. The next morning she had found the back entrance to her shop wide open but the only thing missing was one piece of the recently acquired furniture. She was able to give a good description of the piece of furniture, the truck, and its driver. I wish I had gotten a better description from Lola, but, of course, at the time Lola was telling me the story we did not know it would become important. Somehow though the details Jana provided matched Lola’s story too closely to be coincidence.