A Pyrrhic Mystery by Sarah Shaber

“Cecil Petty is dead,” the voice on the other end of the phone line crowed.  “Is that great, or what?”

     “That is good news,” Simon said.  He was out of bed by now, drawing up his bedroom window shades, staring at the house across the street where Petty had lived for years. 

     “Do you think his daughter will move in, or will she sell the house?”

     Simon’s caller was Mack Smith, a realtor who lived a couple of streets over, hence his obsession with the future of Petty’s house.  He once told Simon that he started each day reading the obituaries, scanning for desirable addresses.

In Simon’s historic neighborhood residents were known by their homes as much as by their names. Mack owned a stucco mission home that would be ugly if it wasn’t so unusual.  Simon lived in a Craftsman bungalow.

Petty’s cottage, the “Hawthorne” from the 1918 Sears mail-order catalog, was easily worth  four hundred thousand dollars today. Not bad appreciation for a one-bathroom shingled home that arrived at its narrow lot in numbered pieces after a cross-country journey by rail.

“Do we know what Professor Petty died of?” Simon asked  Mack.  “Can’t have been his heart.  He didn’t have one.”

Petty may not have met the precise definition of a sociopath, but he came mighty close.  He left his garbage bags in front of his neighbors’ houses on trash collection day. During election season he loitered around the neighborhood’s streets until folks left for work, then he’d sneak onto their front porches and leave homophobic and racist literature clipped to their mailboxes.  He was nasty to the itinerant laborers who canvassed the neighborhood looking for odd jobs, calling the police on them whenever the spirit moved him.  Girl Scouts and high school band members selling cookies or fruit learned not to knock on Petty’s door if they didn’t want it slammed in their faces, preceded by an obscenity or two.  He opposed every initiative the neighborhood association favored. He made life miserable for his graduate students. Simon couldn’t think of a single person who would care to attend his funeral.

     “There’s just one thing,” Mack said.  “His front lawn is crawling with cops.  Why do you suppose that is?”

     Simon saw that it was indeed crawling with cops.  And an ambulance, a City/County Bureau of Investigation van, and a couple of police cruisers lined the curb in front of Petty’s house.  Simon recognized Petty’s son-in-law’s car, a sun-faded blue Volvo station wagon, parked in the driveway behind Petty’s Cadillac.

     “You don’t suppose he’s been murdered, do you?”

Mack said, joking.  “Think of the suspects.”

Simon didn’t answer, but he watched the activity

across the street with some disquiet. 

“You’re in with the police,” Mack said.  “Find out what’s happened.  I’ve got to go to work. Call me.”

Simon was indeed “in” with the police.  A tenured professor of history at Kenan College, a small liberal arts school nestled on a lovely campus nearby, Simon Shaw consulted with police departments on “cold cases”—murders so old his historian’s skills proved essential to their solution.  He was a brilliant scholar and a fine writer. His first book, developed from his doctoral thesis at UNC at Chapel Hill,  had won a Pulitzer Prize. He preferred teaching undergraduates to research and writing, though, which was why he stayed at Kenan. 

Solving murders was Simon’s avocation. After some initial resistance he assumed the label “forensic historian” bestowed on him by the Raleigh News and Observer.  When a profile of him appeared in People magazine, he acquired minor celebrity status.  People recognized him at the grocery store and asked for his autograph.  His friends accused him of relishing the attention.

Simon looked too young to be a full professor.  He was a small man who dressed in blue jeans, drove a Thunderbird, and listened to rock music.  His black curly hair was a little long, and his dark looks echoed those of his mother, a Jewish woman who hailed from Queens.  Simon was a native North Carolinian himself.  His father’s family had lived in the mountains of North Carolina for so long Simon joked that the first Shaw must have sprouted like a mushroom from the damp forest soil in Watauga County, and built his log cabin on the spot. Simon grew up in Boone, where his father taught classics at Appalachian State University and his mother was a public health nurse.

Simon pulled on a t-shirt and jeans and joined the knot of neighbors gathered on the sidewalk opposite Petty’s house.  The bright sun forecast another hot July day.

 

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A Pyrrhic Mystery © Sarah Shaber