A Stone's Throw by James Ziskin (best story books to read .txt) 📗

myself it wasn’t a lie if I didn’t actually pronounce the words. I had, in fact, fired off a few frames of the charred corpses.

Pryor scowled at his men. “My boys shouldn’t have let you in there. It’s dangerous and a crime scene besides.”

The two deputies swallowed their medicine without protest.

“Who do you think they might be?” I asked the sheriff, who deferred to the coroner.

Herb Edelman, a rotund man in his fifties with a bald pate, was hovering over the remains on bended knee.

“One’s clearly a woman,” he said without looking up at me. “The other appears to be an adolescent male. I’ll know better after the postmortems later today. But this isn’t any great mystery. Smoke inhalation. Asphyxiation. Seems a shame to cut them open to prove it.”

At least he was keeping an open mind.

“May I call you later for the results?” I asked.

He turned and squinted up at me, still on his hands and knees in the muck. “No later than seven. I watch Perry Mason at seven thirty.”

“I met William Hopper, you know,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Edelman appeared unimpressed. Too bad. My brief encounter with television’s Paul Drake had been the only bright spot during my trip to Los Angeles earlier in the year, and it still gave me thrills. I kind of had a thing for Paul Drake, even more so after he’d called me beautiful and winked at me. “Any chance that’s an adult male?” I asked, steering myself back to the subject at hand.

With all the grace of a punch-drunk prizefighter stumbling to his feet on the count of nine, the coroner pushed himself up off the muddy ground with both arms and a couple of grunts. Vertical once more, he coughed himself red in the face. After several restorative breaths, he wiped his hands on a cloth, which he tossed aside like a soiled tissue. Someone else would clean it up. Or maybe not. In no hurry to answer my question, he retrieved an Old Gold from a crumpled package in the breast pocket of his jacket, flicked his lighter, and puffed smoke into the air.

“Maybe a jockey?” I prompted, tired of waiting for him to get around to a reply.

“It’s possible,” he said. “Autopsy will tell.”

“An autopsy can tell if he was a jockey?” I asked, doing my best Judy Holliday impression. Either he had no sense of humor or I wasn’t funny.

“What about the caretaker?” Stan asked the sheriff. “You don’t suppose that’s Chuck Lenoir. He’s a pretty small guy.”

Pryor considered the shorter of the two bodies. “Lucky Chuck? Is he still around? He’d be pretty old by now. Why the Shaws kept him on, I can’t understand. Seemed pretty useless to me.”

“And the woman?” I asked. “Anything that might help with an identification?”

“No pocketbook that I can see,” said the coroner, puffing away on his cigarette. No wonder standing up winded him as if he’d just run a four-minute mile backward. “Burned beyond recognition. Everything except for some red hair, an earring in the left earlobe, and a bit of fur. Looks like fox. My wife has one just like it.”

“It won’t be easy putting a name on her,” said Pryor. “Unless someone’s reported her missing. I’ll ask around in Saratoga, Schenectady, and New Holland.”

“We might get lucky and find a fingerprint,” added Edelman.

“What about the fabric around the male’s neck?” I asked. “Almost looks like racing silks.”

The sheriff grunted.

“Could be a lady’s scarf,” offered the coroner.

I doubted that. Orange-and-black diamonds weren’t exactly the latest Paris fashion.

I asked the sheriff if the firemen had given any opinions on the cause of the fire. He shook his head. “Those boys are lucky if they know which is the business end of the hose. I’ll get the Saratoga fire chief out here later today to have a look.”

I thanked him and the coroner for the information and headed back to my car. I had film to develop and a story to write; my friend Fadge was taking me to the races at one.

I managed to drop off my two rolls of Tri-X at the paper, pound out an economical story on the dead bodies discovered in the barn, and phone my editor, Charlie Reese, all before eleven. He asked me what my plan of action was.

“I’ll check with Sheriff Pryor later. He’s going to have the fire chief inspect the scene for signs of arson. And he might have some information on any missing persons who fit the descriptions.”

“What are the descriptions of the victims?”

“Pittsburgh rare.”

Silence from Charlie’s end. I knew he didn’t approve of such dark humor.

“Sorry,” I said. “The coroner is doing the postmortems today. I’ll talk to him before Perry Mason airs. And I’d like to locate Lucky Chuck Lenoir. He’s the caretaker of Tempesta.”

“What else?”

“It’s a long shot, but there’s Issur Jacobs at the New Holland Savings Bank. He handled affairs for Shaw Knitting Mills after they moved away. That can wait till Monday morning.”

“Anything I can do to lend a hand?”

There was a burr under my saddle. Charlie sensed it.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Judge Shaw,” I said. “I’m assuming he’s still the legal owner of the property.”

Charlie drew a breath. “Yes, I see.”

I was well acquainted with Judge Harrison Shaw. His daughter, Jordan, had been murdered in a local motel nearly two years earlier, and I met with the judge many times while working on the story. He’d asked me to help find his daughter’s murderer, and I complied. And succeeded. But the memory was a painful one for me. In the end, once the case had been solved, he’d refused my awkward offer of friendship and commiseration; my own father had been murdered the year before. The rejection had left me feeling gutted, humiliated, and angry.

Charlie hemmed. While not the most constant pillar of support, he was, nevertheless, usually in my corner. But now he was offering precious little in the way of help. I’d have