Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

Outfoxxed by David Delman

© 1995 by David Delman

David Delman’s interests as an author are not limited to crime fiction. He has written novels about subjects as diverse as British tennis and the American Civil War, and even his mystery stories for EQMM could almost he classified as mainstream. Mr. Delman’s most recently published crime novel is The Last Gambit (St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

When the phone rings at two in the morning the caller figures to be a caller you wish was calling someone else. The caller was my cousin LaMar. The above applies.

“You awake, Roy?”

“I’m always awake at two A.M. It’s my favorite time.”

“Sheriff Foxx has disappeared.”

That caused me to blink rapidly a few times and clear my throat once or twice before saying, “What exactly do you mean, disappeared?”

“I mean no one’s seen him for two whole days. Not his wife, not his deputy, not his dentist—”

“His what?”

“Which is where he was supposed to be going, only he never got there. Where have you been, Roy?”

“Campaigning, of course. Where would I be with the election the day after tomorrow.”

“The thing is, that deputy of his, Sam Bethune, you know who I mean?”

“Tub of lard. Mean eyes. One of those who isn’t his nephew.”

“That’s Bethune. He’s spent most of the day in Minnie O’s saying you had something to do with how the sheriffs gone missing.”

“Something like what?”

“He’s not being real specific about that part, Roy — where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling for two days.”

“Are you deaf, LaMar? I just told you — on the stump. Got in around midnight.”

“Don’t you listen to your messages?”

“Well, that time of night I hoped they’d keep.”

“Roy, tell me true. Did you and Felix Foxx cross paths somewhere near Galway?”

“That’s the part Bethune’s being specific about, I take it.”

“Yeah.”

“When was it supposed to have happened?”

“Day before yesterday. He says about eleven P.M., just where Route 40 runs into Bedford Pike, you and Felix had a near head-on, only Felix swerved at the last minute and dinged your right rear instead. After which you both emerged from your vehicles, had words, came to blows, and you got decked in front of two witnesses.”

“Pretty funny story.”

“Funny? I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s on its way to scary.”

“Is Bethune being specific about who those witnesses are?”

“Uh-uh. He says they’re a couple of country boys who got in a brawl of their own, and Felix was taking them in to cool them off. They were locked in the back of his wagon so that you couldn’t see them. Which is why Bethune won’t reveal their identities. He’s got to protect them from you, he says.”

“Funnier and funnier.”

“Is it? How come I’m not doubled over?”

“And the rest of what he’s being non-specific about pertains to what I’m supposed to have done to Felix, causing him to disappear?”

“Roy...”

“Still here.”

“Bethune spent three full hours in Minnie’s last night haranguing whoever came by. And you know what — nobody was laughing.”

I sighed, thinking about Felix Foxx, thinking about the town I live in, thinking about how dumb it was to underestimate the sheriffs grip on his constituency, and said, “Well, maybe funny wasn’t the right word.”

“Put some coffee on. I’m coming over.”

He hung up. I got into jeans and a wool sweater — gets coolish at night here in Blue Ridge country come mid-September — and went into the kitchen to do as LaMar had told me. Too often, I do what LaMar Hunnicut tells me, a habit I got into because he’s six months the older. LaMar says that so-called habit is a nonexistent habit, claimed by me whenever it’s convenient to wriggle out from under.

Anyway, his ma and mine were sisters. He’s not only kin, he bills himself as my best friend, and I guess he is if you’ll allow the term a certain elasticity. He’s also editor and publisher of the Black Rock Gazette, the weekly cash cow that’s kept Hunnicuts comfortable upwards of seventy-five years. LaMar and I have been around for thirty-four of them, him those six months longer.

Despite what he says, LaMar’s got this rapid-fire mouth, which he’s used more times than I like to remember to talk me into follies of one sort or another. Back when we were freshmen at the university, for instance, he made me believe Dean Howard’s wife would... And she didn’t. And I almost didn’t get to be a sophomore.

LaMar says that then as always I believed what I wanted to believe.

When the coffee was ready I poured a cup and took it over to the window. Staring out, I found myself thinking of Fay Carteret Loomis, a subject tangential to follies. Our marriage was taking on the aspect of one, I decided glumly. Damn the woman. Maybe she was Black Rock’s quintessential beauty over the last half century — LaMar’s claim for her — but she had absolutely no tolerance for human frailty.

All the Carterets are strait-laced, and Fay Carteret Loomis, flesh of their flesh, wouldn’t cut an inch of slack for a blind man balancing on an airplane wing. I mean, one extra beer at an old friend’s bachelor party, and it’s like the second coming of Benedict Arnold.

All right, maybe two extra beers, maybe even three. And what if I did miss the Carteret family barbecue that night due to a perfectly understandable lapse of memory.

“Lapse nothing. You were drunk as a skunk, and I wouldn’t even mind that so much except you just used it as an excuse. The fact is, you don’t like my family.”

“I do like your family, in bits and pieces, but when they come at you in battalion strength...”

“Oh, how you can twist things, Roy Loomis. Everybody thinks it’s LaMar who’s the song-and-dancer, but it’s really you. You, Roy Loomis, have an honest face and a deceitful nature.”

And with that she packed two bags and flounced off. River’s Edge is where she came to earth, of course — the Carteret compound where all hurt Carterets go to lick their wounds.

That was five weeks ago.

Till then we’d never been apart more than a few days in four years of marriage. According to LaMar, we’re a pair of stubborn jackasses, but the fact is I didn’t desert her in the middle of a political campaign.

True, when she left, none of us (except LaMar maybe) knew there was going to be a campaign, but how much does that change things? She knows now, doesn’t she?

It was a quiet night at Minnie O’s, Desertion Day plus eight, and there I was sitting on a barstool sharing insights with Barney Cox when my banty cousin came roostering in. He thumbed Barney to some other corner.

“You stay where you are, Barney,” I said, alerted to danger by LaMar’s body language. “Nobody died and left him king.”

But since Barney is on the Gazette payroll — a combination obit writer, classified-ad taker, and demon photographer — LaMar’s word weighed the heavier. He was gone. I was talking to the wall.

“Roy,” LaMar said, settling in. “Boozing isn’t going to get Fay back.”

“I don’t want Fay back.”

“And I don’t want a Pulitzer Prize.”

“Anyway, you’re being ridiculous. A beer or two while discussing, among other things, the dark side of marriage as an institution, is not boozing. You sound like a Carteret, for God’s sake. LaMar, when are you going to marry?”

He sensed the ill feeling behind the question and chose not to reply.

Minnie put a cold one before him, leaning forward as she did in behalf of her famous cleavage. For a moment the male segment of her patronage held its collective breath.

Minnie’s both a good-looking widow and a Black Rock success story. In her forties now — red hair, lively blue eyes — she still has the figure that electrified the eighth grade of her time.

When Mike O’Hara got mistaken for a three-point buck a few seasons back, Minnie took over the Shamrock Bar & Grill (now Minnie O’s) one step ahead of the bankruptcy court. To the surprise of all, it turned out she was this natural businesswoman. Did some redecorating. Hired two new short-order cooks. Pretty soon much of Black Rock had developed the Minnie O’ habit, dropping in for a bit of finger food, some conviviality, and rations of gossip. Married ladies, too, though a segment of that segment was impelled by the need to reconnoiter.

They knew, the county knew, Minnie was sleeping with someone’s husband. Discreet as she was, however, there was no way to find out who if you weren’t willing to be active.

Actually, only a few of us ever found out anyway.

But I’m getting slightly ahead of my story.

“I was rooting through the Gazette files this morning,” LaMar said, remembering he had an axe to grind, “searching out background for my Sunday material. I’d got to thinking about corruption and how easy it is to get comfortable with it. In the end, as someone bright once said to me, societies fall apart because of the cheats they tolerate. You probably forgot who that someone is.”

I kept silent.

“So I’m going through the files, and lo, I come across the story I did on a certain FBI guy who, through sheer cussedness, broke up an embezzlement scam involving very big fish in six states.” He paused. “Roy, you were one hell of an FBI guy.”

“What do you want me to say, LaMar?”

“I sure miss that cussedness.”

And he looked at me admiringly. I have to admit that LaMar has a way of doing that to which I am partial. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t do it all that often. Once every two or three years is about his quota. So I found myself momentarily nostalgic — just as if shark-eat-shark politics hadn’t made a career switch entirely sensible for that certain FBI guy.

“I was pretty damn cussed, wasn’t I?”

“As cussed a law enforcer as you’ve been white bread as a lawyer.”

Trust LaMar to give it to you between the eyes. And yet it was no more than I’d said to myself on lonely truth-telling nights. In the years since I’d returned to Black Rock, my private practice had grown increasingly private.

“It’s because your heart isn’t in it, and people sense that,” LaMar said. He paused. “I told that to Fay last night.”

“LaMar,” I said, irritated. “Does it ever occur to you that Fay is another man’s wife?”

“She was this man’s girlfriend once.”

“That was back in high school, for God’s sake.”

He put the beer mug down, then turned to face me squarely. “I’ve told you before and I’ll keep telling you until you take me seriously. There’s only one woman in the world for me, and that’s Fay Carteret Loomis. If I could steal her from you I would. In a New York minute. No matter what the consequences. But I can’t, you fool. She has this weakness for you, which is the only thing about her I find less than admirable.”

I let my breath out in a heavy sigh. “Okay, what else did you tell her?”

“When?”

“Last night, when you were doing your best to poison the air.”

His expression remained unchanged. It was his noblesse oblige look, almost as familiar to me as his snake-oil salesman’s.

“I told her you weren’t the man to survive working at what bored him. I said it’s why you’d been boozing. And I also suggested that maybe, just maybe, she’d been paying too much attention to Carterets at the expense of a Loomis.”

“You really did?”

He nodded. And I believed him. And right there, I guess, is the reason why hopping mad as I sometimes get at him, I’ll always, at bottom, love him.

“LaMar...”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

“Would you care to hear what she said?”

“Yes.”

“She told me to keep my pointy nose out of her business.”

In some manner — I bet LaMar could tell you exactly — we moved from there to a discussion of just how shamelessly bent Felix Foxx was. And how Black Rock County deserved better. And how all my friends were damn sick and tired of me sitting on my tailbone. And this and that, until willy-nilly I was off my tailbone and onto the minority-party ticket.

The irony here is that Felix Foxx and I have always got on. We have a history. He and my daddy became friends as second-graders, hunting buddies later. Felix visited our house a lot when I was growing up — even after Daddy was named to the State Supreme Court as its youngest associate justice.

But they were yin and yang really, and a split was inevitable. I was there when it happened. Actually, as things turned out, I was a pivotal figure.

“Felix,” I remember Daddy saying that evening, “there’s suddenly much talk about you at the State House, talk of a disturbing nature, and it’s come to me I probably owe you a warning.”

His voice was quiet, so quiet it failed to fully detatch me from an adolescent torpor.

But Felix was alerted, I know now. “What warning is that, Judge?” he asked, decibel levels matching my daddy’s.

It was midsummer and hot, and we’d been sitting out on the back porch for the past ten minutes or so, soaking up ice tea and the glories of a North Carolina sunset. Relaxed in body and mind, we’d been. But now Daddy had a set to his mouth.

He went on. “Out of friendship, understood?”

“Sure enough.”

“All right, then, quick and straight: If they catch your hand in the till, and it’s me you go up before, friendship won’t signify. So apply your fabled cunning, Br’er Foxx, to stay out of my courtroom.”

Felix nodded that big shaggy head of his, shrugged those barn-door shoulders, and told Daddy not to fret.

“Judge,” he said, “trust me to do whatever needs doing.” Having put that into words, he paused. I remember that pause for two reasons. One, it went on for a while, as if he had just, by accident, bumped into a bedrock principle. And two, because of the wicked way he grinned.

“I just realized why good folk like you get skunked all the time by no-account folk like me.”

“Indeed? Why is that?”

“Because I always do what needs doing. No matter what, no matter to who.”

Daddy smiled. “A warning of your own, Br’er Foxx?”

“Out of friendship, Judge.”

“Well, I take your point. It’s true though, isn’t it, that the phrase ‘fire with fire’ was invented by good folk?”

“Mmmm. Happen so, Judge. By good folk who maybe got their fingers burnt right after.”

Even to me it seemed noticeably cooler on that porch.

It was then Felix said, “Roy, how far would you guess it was to the main fencepost, the one with the mailbox on it? About thirty yards?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Twenty dollars says I can beat you there.”

At the time I was about seventeen, tall, thin, and vain of my flying feet — a dash man on the Black Rock High track team. And twenty dollars was an uncanny guess. I mean, how had Felix known the exact figure that would double my treasury?

The man crammed into the white wicker rocker opposite me weighed in the neighborhood of 280 pounds. Though he was six-three, that was still at least fifty pounds too many. Clearly, he was there for the taking.

I looked at my daddy, whose glance was fixed on his old friend. “Up to you, son,” he said.

Felix reached into his pocket, produced a fat roll, and peeled off a bill.

I got two tens from my skinny wallet, rendering my treasury nil.

“Judge, will you hold the stakes?”

He said he would, and we passed over our wagers.

“Good enough,” Felix said heartily. “All right now, in consideration of twenty-five years and all these pounds, I get to say Go, agreed?”

After shaking his outstretched hand I dropped into my sprinter’s crouch, ready, willing, and eager to put an old fogy in his place.

The O.F. heaved his bulk off the rocker and tortoised his way to ground level. It was when he took his third unhurried step toward the fencepost that I realized what was being done to me.

“Not fair,” I yelped.

Five yards short of the fencepost he turned. “Go!” he said, grinning.

Out of sheer fury I tried, but only a sudden coronary or a partisan lightning bolt could have changed the course of events. Neither happened.

Felix strolled back to collect his money. Daddy handed it over and said mildly, “End of the line, Br’er Foxx.”

Felix nodded. “Figured as much. Going to miss you, Judge.”

And though they spent another hour equably enough, comparing dogs and hunting rifles, Felix never did set foot on that porch again. Or for that matter in my father’s courtroom.

When Daddy died, eight years later, his funeral drew a lot of folk and a lot of flowers. Felix’s wreath was among the biggest. And he sat in the second row, I remember, just behind my mom, patting her shoulder and looking like he’d lost his best friend.

Since then Felix Foxx has won himself four more elections, bringing his total to twelve, which in Black Rock County adds up to nearly a quarter century of useful service.

Useful? Well, there’s that Tara look-alike he owns on ten acres just outside of Galway, our county seat. There’s the pair of daughters he’s sent to fancy colleges in the East, and let’s not forget all those other little Foxxes (cousins and nephews) to whom he’s given employment through the years.

He used to insist it was his wife’s money that paid for most of the extras until Edna Mae made him stop. It sounded, she once told her garden club, as if Garretson bucks were the sole reason Felix had married her, which everybody knows is the case, of course. The Garretsons have owned banks in these parts since before the Revolutionary War. And going back at least that far, Garretson women had set standards for plain looks and bad temper.

Edna Mae is in the tradition. She once flung a five-pound weight at the window of her daddy’s Galway branch because some teller, foolhardy as he was upright, figured a bouncing check might be educative. Old man Garretson had the window fixed and the teller fired, on direct orders from Edna Mae. Educative, sure enough.

Edna Mae’s the only person in Black Rock who regularly cuts Felix down to size. Her size. She’s a little woman, five one, 110 soaking wet, but when her nostrils whiten and her tiny fists tighten, her hulk of a husband shuffles his feet, runs thick fingers around his collar, and acts just like he wasn’t a legend in his own time.

On occasion, LaMar tries to demythify him, too. He’ll break out in blistering editorials detailing Felix’s forays into graft, bribery, and double-dipping. Felix shrugs these off as not only mendacious but mean-spirited. And he’s got this really cute put-upon sigh which he trots out now and again for the sympathetic patrons at Minnie O’s.

Lately, of course, there’s an added starter in the demythifying field. Me. Going around the county armed with LaMar’s litany of larceny, I demythify strenuously.

Do my fellow citizens believe me?

Sure they do. Show me a bright two-year-old, and I’ll show you a kid who knows Felix Foxx is corrupt beyond redemption.

“Felix is Felix,” Minnie told me the day I got started, a representative comment — though Minnie, for reasons that will come clear later, isn’t exactly a representative case. “No, he’s not as honest as, say, LaMar Hunnicut, but he’s a lot more fun. And he sure knows how to keep a body safe.” Flexing part of hers to underscore the value of the service.

And that much is true. Felix and his twenty-five deputies (currently only a baker’s dozen are nephews) do keep the law-and-order lid on, but at a cost that could activate the NYPD.

“Minnie,” I said, “how’d you like a serious reduction in your property tax. Serious.” I put forward a percentage. “Just from what I won’t steal.”

And, you know, about the fourth or fifth time I held her still for my siren song a look came into her eyes, the look of a natural businesswoman.

A look I’ve been seeing in rising numbers around the county. Cupidity, some might call it, even downright greed. I called it a confidence-builder. And a lesson in practical politics. I’d been learning what I’ll bet my forerunners knew back in the caves — that for impressing the hell out of an electorate, there’s nothing like a red-hot pocketbook issue.

And what I’d been learning about elections in general, Felix Foxx had been learning about this one, count on it.

He’d disappeared, had he?

I didn’t think so — not for a New York minute.

Actually, it was the ding in my right rear — which of course didn’t come about the way Deputy Bethune said it did — that had first set me thinking.

Emerging from a diner in Galway — about three in the afternoon, not eleven at night, nowhere near Route 40 or Bedford Pike — I’d come upon the ding. After studying it a bit, it began to seem a ding of a different color; that is, one produced by a mallet as opposed to a collision.

Add that to the shift in the political winds, and my guess was Felix had set about “doing whatever needs doing.”

I looked at my watch. Still about ten minutes before LaMar could arrive. Why not wake up Barney Cox, I asked myself — rhetorically, since I’d already decided that was a good idea.

Blearily, Barney acknowledged that he had what I’d hired him for. Yeah, it would do the job, he thought. And sure he could bring the stuff over if I really needed him to, but did I know what time it was? I told him I did and that there’d be a crack-of-dawn bonus to sweeten the pot. He purred contentedly and said he was on his way. After hanging up, I called him again to make sure he hadn’t purred himself back to sleep. He had, but promised not to again.

I went outside to look at the moon to see if that had disappeared, too.

Three minutes later, with his customary screech of brakes, LaMar made the scene. But not alone. Of all people, Fay Carteret Loomis was with him.

And out she came firing — before LaMar’s BMW had stopped spinning its wheels, I swear.

“All right,” she said, swinging a suitcase in my general direction while she went back for another, “I’m home. I’ll bet the place is a pigsty.”

“It isn’t.”

Which she ignored. “You never did know how to take care of things, Roy Loomis. If it wasn’t dark I bet I’d see what a jungle you’ve got growing here.”

“I paid young Jamie Anderson to look after your garden.”

“Where are my tomatoes? I bet there isn’t a single one of them left alive. And I shudder to think of the condition my glads might be in.”

I stood up and started back into the house.

That got LaMar into the act. “Damn you, Roy, you better listen to Fay. Considering the mess you’re in, you need all the support you can get.”

“I’ll listen to her whenever she’s ready to talk to me. Fay, why are you back?”

“Because you’re in trouble, you fool. Why else?”

And in the next minute she was in my arms, sobbing fit to kill, and she felt so good there I told her if I’d known what a remedy trouble would be I’d have arranged for some long since. I sat her down on the steps and put my arms around her, holding her close. “Okay, LaMar, what kind of mess am I in?”

“Sam Bethune’s telling it you’re a murder suspect.”

When I felt Fay shiver against me I held her closer and made shushing noises.

“Bethune now says the two witnesses who saw Felix deck you then heard you threaten to kill him. Is that true?”

“Nope. Go on.”

“Go on? All right, Roy, I’ll go on. From where I’m standing, dark as it is, I can see a dinged fender on that jalopy of yours.”

“It’s dinged, all right.”

LaMar swore under his breath.

Fay burrowed into me.

“Roy,” LaMar said, “I’m not quitting on you no matter how big the mess is, but I got something to ask you point-blank. Now I know you didn’t kill anybody, but did you have anything to do with Felix’s disappearance?”

Not being sure just how to answer that, I kept on smoothing Fay’s hair and kissing her forehead occasionally while I tried to work something out. That made LaMar mad, and he kicked his BMW tire to show me.

“Let’s just wait a bit,” I said finally.

“For what? For hell to freeze over? For Bethune to come marching up here with maybe six friends in white sheets?”

“For Barney.”

He blinked. “Will you tell me what the Sam Hill you’re talking about?”

LaMar’s banty stance and slung-out jaw was now making me as mad as he was. “Felix’s disappearance isn’t a real disappearance, damn it. It’s meant to discredit me and win him an election. I mean, who wants a murderer for a sheriff? Most any electorate will put up with a crook, of course, but a killer? That’s a bit much. Anyway, after the votes are counted — me on the short end — he’ll turn up full of explanations. A sudden secret mission for the President of the United States; a short-term bout with amnesia. Does it matter? We’re talking vintage Br’er Foxx. Only this time it’s not going to work.”

“It’s not?”

“No way.”

Fay stood up then and said, “I think I’ll do myself a favor and not listen to the rest of this just now. You don’t mind, do you, shug?”

I shook my head.

After a couple of steps, however, she turned, came back, and kissed me. “But you can tell me about it later if you want to, all right?”

I grinned and said it was.

In the meantime LaMar had been studying me. “You know where Felix is, don’t you?”

I nodded. “At Minnie’s. That pretty little cottage she has out beyond Galway? White picket fence? Nice little rose garden? Private little swimming pool — private enough for skinny-dipping or sportive behavior in general. I set Barney on Felix’s tail right after Deputy Bethune or a designated hitter took a mallet to my fender.” I paused. “Barney and his telephoto lens.”

LaMar studied me some more, then his eyes widened. “You’re going to threaten to show pictures to Edna Mae. By God, you’re going to blackmail Felix into quitting.”

“It’s called doing whatever needs doing,” I said.

Now I don’t think LaMar was as shocked as he pretended to be, because he knows me so well. A lot better than Felix Foxx does.