4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4 Read Online Free PDF Page A

installing reproductions on colonial style mansions here in the valley and there is a big market for reproductions.”
    “No kidding.”
    “No kidding. Anyway, from the outside—or the exterior, you need a fairly long stemmed key to engage the lock on the backside of the door. The point is…” Ike frowned and thought through his discussion with Lydell earlier, “…if the key is wedged in the lock on the inside, you can’t really get at it from the outside. So, Henry had to break down the door.”
    They drove in silence for a few moments.
    “Karl, speaking of Henry, what did you learn from that elegant display of body art while I was in the basement?”
    “Well, for one thing, and for what it’s worth, he is not angry you passed him over for the deputy’s job. He thinks you hired me. I told him you haven’t hired anyone, yet. Second, Lydell, he says, is cheap, arrogant, and has a high opinion of himself based on his membership in all that alphabet soup you told me about when we arrived.”
    “Soup?”
    “DAR, FFV, that soup.”
    “Oh. And…?”
    “Lydell writes books and is thinking of turning his home into a reenactment tourist stop.”
    “A what?”
    “You know, like Williamsburg—people in costumes showing folks around ‘de ole plantation.’ He’s restoring three slave quarter cabins out back. I don’t know where he’s going to find any black folks to play slaves, but that’s what Henry says he has in mind.”
    “Maybe you could volunteer. Is he paying?”
    “No way, Boss…oh, and I had a chance to talk with Mrs. Antonelli. She’s from New Jersey. She made a point of telling me her niece was dating an African American.”
    “What?”
    “Northern liberal angst. She wants me to know she’s not a racist.”
    “But when she says something like that—”
    “It tells me that she is, in the upside down way…‘Some of my best friends…’ and all that.”
    They’d turned the corner and left the shady two-hundred-year-old trees that lined the Old Coach Road to Bolton. Ike put on his sun glasses. Karl had never taken his off.
    “Anything else?”
    “Yeah. This might be important. Mrs. Antonelli says that Grotz booked the room in her place, but was more than happy to swap with another guest who had been placed across the street. Apparently her brochure states that in the event too many guests arrive and the room configuration can not accommodate the various combinations of guests—”
    “I get it.”
    “—and Lydell gets paid for the inconvenience. Anyway, this one guy was disappointed. He’d wanted to stay in the two-century old inn. So Grotz said, ‘No problem,’ and he offered to change places, even seemed eager to do it. Very nice of him she thought.”
    “Why would that be important?”
    “I don’t know, but in my experience, such as it is, small things, even inconsequential stuff like this, can come back on you later, like…”
    “Like?”
    “Like chili peppers.”
    “Or door keys.”

Chapter 5
    Henry Sutherlin watched the police car disappear down Old Coach Road and turned back toward Lydell’s house. He gazed at the door and its lock, its screws nearly pulled free, and the receiver lying on the floor. He frowned and scratched his head. Henry and his six brothers grew up in Picketsville and had been raised in its history and folklore. So, he figured Ike must know about the first Lydell house murder. Of course, the new guy, the Black Stork, they called him around town, he wouldn’t, and so he didn’t ask. But you’d have thought Ike would have. He bent over and was about to pick up the receiver when a big guy in a pair of blue overalls and latex gloves yelled, “Don’t touch that.”
    The evidence technicians were working the scene. Henry jerked back and apologized. He spent the next two hours watching them work. One of them, a short thin guy Henry thought he remembered from high school, but whose name he couldn’t recall, had a set of tattoos that must have cost a