Probable Claws

24

January 27, 2017

Friday

“A baby brontosaurus.” Harry lifted up a small rubber dinosaur as she sat on the floor of Gary’s, now Tazio’s, office, which she had opened Monday, January 23rd.

“I thought you came in here to go over your plans?” Tazio, perched on a stool at the drafting table, reminded her.

“Well, I did. I want to, but Fair downloaded all the building codes for me going back to 1980.”

“The sheriff’s department combed through every file box.”

“I know.” Harry held up her right forefinger since Pewter wanted the brontosaurus. “This doesn’t belong to you.”

“It doesn’t belong to you, either.” The gray cat sniffed. “Since Gary’s dead the toy should be given away. He liked me so give me the dinosaur.”

“You’ve been rifling through 1983 for an hour now. All you’ve found is one rubber toy. If it were important the department would have kept it.”

Harry scrambled to her feet, lifted up the file box, walked over to the traditional desk, not the drafting table, placing it on the top. “Come here for a minute.”

“I will if you’ll come to go over these plans with me.”

“All right but look at this.”

Brinkley nudged his human. “Indulge her.”

“Here I am.” Tazio pulled up another chair on rolling casters to sit beside Harry, who was just burning to show her the files.

Carefully lifting out the papers that she had dog-eared, she pointed. “Okay. Here’s a job on West Broad Street. Big car dealership. Look at the note in the margin.”

“ ‘Replace steel I-beam on northwest corner.’ ” Tazio read aloud then said, “So?”

“I have 1983 downloaded, remember. On the page regarding steel qualifications, stress, elasticity, that stuff, there’s no such memo.”

“Harry, why would there be? The code is just the code. There isn’t feedback.”

“I know, but did he report this, or did the construction company find the problem and simply replace it?”

“You’d need to go through Rankin Construction’s files.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to tell Coop. And this little toy. Look on this sheet. More jobs. More notes.”

Tazio peered at a paper for an office building, very modern, right on the Henrico/Goochland county line. “Little dinosaur footprints. Harry, he obviously was wrapped up with dinosaurs. This is a doodle, not a note.”

“A doodle with a rubber dinosaur in the box. He put his dinosaurs on the shelf. Put them in the box. I need to go through every file box to see what’s in the margins and what toys are there.”

“You’re obsessed. Number one. Number two. The sheriff’s department had to cite whatever they found in these file boxes. I’m sure the dinosaurs will be noted. It can’t be that important or questions would have been asked of all of us close to Gary. Okay, I’ve looked. Now come and look at the drawings.”

Harry left the box on the desk, trudged to the drafting table to go over the plans.

“I’m going to slay the dragon,” Pewter grandly announced. “Besides, we can’t sit on the drafting table. It’s on a slant.”

Mrs. Murphy, Tucker, and Brinkley followed to the back room, door to the bathroom shut. Mostly they tagged along because they, too, were somewhat interested in the spider. However, the two dogs and the cat did not aspire to murder. For one thing, she was so big the squish would be too gross. For another thing, it was live and let live.

Pewter slunk to the little hole in the baseboard.

“I know you’re in there.”

Nothing.

“You can’t fool me.”

That fast the large spider blasted out of the hole, shot through Pewter’s legs to disappear under the slight space under the bathroom door.

“She attacked me!” Pewter screamed.

Harry appeared quickly. “What is going on?”

“A spider. She’s as big as a crab. She attacked me!” Pewter’s pupils looked like big black marbles.

“Let’s all go into the workroom. Pewter, you look like a porcupine.”

“You know, it was scary,” Brinkley admitted.

“Huge!” Pewter meowed.

“It was,” Mrs. Murphy agreed. “But you’re being a Drama Queen.”

“The spider knows that.” Tucker tormented Pewter. “She wants to hear you scream.”

“You’d scream, too, if she came after you. The world’s biggest spider.”

Tazio glanced up from the papers. “And?”

“I have no idea.” Harry joined her again. “They did find a triangular stud in a crack when Cooper and I came back here after Gary’s murder. I thought it might be important. Apparently not. Who knows how long it was in that crack?”

“The spider took it. Probably tore it off a jacket or someone’s purse. I bet she knows more than she’s telling.”

“Pewter, spiders don’t talk.” Mrs. Murphy sat by Harry’s chair.

“You don’t know that. I bet they talk to one another.”

“How can they talk when their mouths move like pincers?” Tucker asked.

“Our jaws are long and we can talk,” Brinkley offered.

“We also have tongues. Spiders don’t.” Tucker would have none of it.

“That doesn’t mean they can’t hum. They can communicate. I just know that giant spider has told all her friends about me.” Pewter’s ego, inflated again, irritated the others.

“I’m sure,” Mrs. Murphy dryly said.

Tazio, her left hand resting on Brinkley’s head, pointed to the loft with a pencil. “Do you want planed but unfinished oak or something else?”

“It’s just storage.” Harry shrugged.

“So it is, but it does give you an opportunity to make another work space or even a bedroom. Why don’t you put in planed oak and stain it, put drop cloths over it, and then put whatever you want up there? This gives you more options if your needs change, and Harry, you know as well as I do, building never gets cheaper. Do it now.”

That struck home. “Well…maybe.”

“This isn’t much square footage. An upgrade won’t be expensive. Maybe you’d like something other than oak.”

“No. Oak. I need hardwood. Need hardwood in the downstairs, too. Even though there won’t be much traffic. And even though the uneven-width heart pine in my kitchen is beautiful, it scratches up all the time and I’m rubbing it all the time.”

“Right.” Tazio smiled, knowing she’d swung Harry to a more versatile decision.

The two worked for another hour, going over everything. The little Napoleon clock struck five.

“Where’d the time go?” Harry exclaimed.

Tazio looked up at the graceful hands. “Somewhere we can never retrieve it. Do you know I read about air? I thought the article was going to be about pollution, but it wasn’t. Air doesn’t disappear, and the article said that every two thousand breaths we inhale air that Julius Caesar inhaled.”

“No kidding.” Harry, impressed, then tidied up her pile of notes. “Let me put back the file box and head home. Dark already. I actually like winter but dark at five, not so much.”

“Me, too.”

Once home Harry called Cooper, told her everything about the file box for 1983 and what she thought. She urged Cooper to call Rankin Construction.

“I will but I want to go through the boxes myself before I do that. The research team mentioned marginal notes and rubber toys. No one thought it important, and I don’t know that it is, but I want to see for myself.”

“Can’t hurt.”

“Hold on one sec.” Cooper squinted at a message intruding on the computer screen.

“Harry, when you get home turn on the news. Forensics in Richmond has retrieved the rest of the skeleton and are laying it out on the spot.” She read more, looked at photos. “Male. Middle-aged. A bullet lodged in his left front rib. I doubt the news will show you what we see.”

“Front rib?”

“Probably shot from behind with a light caliber bullet. Stuck in the bone. Murder.”

“You were the one who told me amateurs spray bullets or fire too many.”

“I did.”

“Another marksman.” Harry’s heart was racing.

“A good shot at any rate.” Cooper sighed. “I don’t know how you do it, but you turn up at critical moments.”

“Dumb luck.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t bad luck.”