“I know I’ve got it here somewhere.” Her voice floated to me from the back of the house. “I’ll find it. You’ll see. You’ll see that I met him.”
Since I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Ted the antiques appraiser or about those guys I didn’t know, the ones named Jimmy and Telly (wasn’t he a character from
Gloria’s furniture was cheap and not worth mentioning. The wall-to-wall carpet had seen better days. She had a big-screen TV next to an aquarium where a dead fish floated on top of the water. There were a couple magazines on her coffee table, and a couple pieces of mail. Curious, I took a deep breath, held it, and hurried over there. I shuffled through the mail, checking it out.
An electric bill. An ad from a local dentist. What looked like a birthday card.
Nothing interesting, and certainly nothing that would help with my case.
“Ah, here it is!” I heard Gloria say, and I dropped the mail back on the table before she got back to the room. It slid under a three-month-old
For a second, I simply stared. But I knew another second would be too long. I scooped up the paper, folded it, and stuffed it into the pocket of my khakis.
Just in time, too.
“Here it is.” Gloria shuffled back into the room holding a business card. She handed it over. Sunshine grumbled when I got too close.
Gloria pointed at the name printed on the card in raised lettering. “See? See, right there. It was Ted Studebaker himself, all right. Just like I said. I saw a car pull up. Something slick and shiny. I knew it wasn’t anybody who’d been here before so I went over to see what was going on. You know, the way a good neighbor would. Nick was just coming out of the house and he introduced me. That’s when Ted Studebaker gave me that card.”
I gave the card a careful look. It was printed on quality paper and embossed with an eagle in the background. Ted Studebaker Antiques, it said, was located in Chagrin Falls, a charming and highfalutin suburb to the east, and it said that Ted was a specialist in presidential “autographs, memorabilia, and ephemera.”
“So Nick was talking to a presidential collector.” I said this to no one in particular, but of course, Gloria assumed I was talking to her.
“That’s right.” She grabbed a plastic cigarette lighter from a nearby table and fired up another smoke. “I heard them. You know, when I was on my way over there. Nick was telling Ted Studebaker to come on inside, telling him he had lots to show him. Ted, he wasn’t even through the front door and Nick was asking about what stuff was worth and if anybody would want it.”
“Did Studebaker say anybody would?”
“Well, it never got that far. Not as far as I heard, anyway. Because that’s when me and Sunshine, we showed up to see who the stranger was and we introduced ourselves. Didn’t we, Sunshine?” She kissed the dog on the top of the head.
At least it wasn’t on the lips. I took comfort in the thought.
“I can tell you that Studebaker, just looking inside the Klinker place from the front porch, he was practically foaming at the mouth. That’s how excited he was to get in there and start rooting through things. When we were leaving, they went into the house, and I heard Nick say something about how he wanted to sell it. All of it.”
I thought about the neat piles of Garfield kitsch in Marjorie’s house. It made sense that Nick would have been through it. Especially if he wanted to sell it all.
Well, maybe
Those were problems for another day. So was Ted Studebaker. For now, I had more important things to think about, so I thanked Gloria for her help, got in my car, and did that thinking.
Remember, at our first meeting, Gloria was the one who told me she wanted Marjorie Klinker dead.
She was also the one who swore up and down that she didn’t really know what the statue of President Garfield at the cemetery looked like, because she’d never been to Garden View.
At the next red light, I reached in my pocket and pulled out what I’d swiped from Gloria’s coffee table.
It was a brochure from the Garfield Memorial. Yep, the same brochure we hand out to visitors.
13
