Dead Body Language Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  DEAD BODY LANGUAGE

  “Penny Warner’s charming debut mystery, DEAD BODY LANGUAGE, is a double hit with a bright, fresh heroine, deaf sleuth Connor Westphal, and a cheery, piquant background, the California gold country.”—Carolyn Hart, author of Death in Lovers Lane

  “Penny Warner has created a fascinating community of eccentrics, a delightfully complex plot and a heroine who is charming, clever and funny. DEAD BODY LANGUAGE is a treasure.”—Jill Churchill, author of Grime and Punishment

  “Penny Warner’s witty, courageous protagonist, Connor Westphal, tugs at hearts and engages minds, making for a rewarding read. Way to go, Penny!”—Diane Day, author of Fire and Fog

  DEAD BODY LANGUAGE

  A Bantam Crime Line Book/June 1997

  CRIME LINE and the portrayal of a boxed “cl” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Line drawings by Frank Hildebrand.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1997 by Penny Warner.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-57335-3

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  To Matthew and Rebecca.

  And to Tom, my partner in crime.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I very much want to thank the following experts in their fields for assistance on detail and veracity:

  Dr. Linda Barde, Director of Special Education Services and Sign Language Instructor, Chabot College, Hayward, California

  Joyanne Burdett, Librarian, California School for the Deaf, Fremont, California

  Colma Cemeteries, Colma, California

  Linda Davis, Features Editor, Valley Times, Pleasanton, California

  DCARA - Deaf Counseling and Referral Agency, San Leandro, California

  Melanie Ellington, Counseling and Correctional Services, Jamestown, California

  David Goll, City Editor, Valley Times, Pleasanton, California

  Robert Goll, Managing Editor, Daily Ledger, Antioch, California

  Kay Grant, Near Escapes, San Francisco, California

  Mario Marcoli, Gold Prospector, Jamestown, California

  Donna Melander, Certified Interpreter for the Deaf, Fremont, California

  Sgt. Keith W. Melton, retired, California Highway Patrol

  Beverly Jackson, Sign Language Instructor, Mt. Diablo Adult School, Concord, California

  Mother Lode Coffee Shop, Jamestown, California

  Dr. Boyd Stevens, Chief Medical Examiner, San Francisco Coroner’s office, San Francisco, California

  Jacquelyn Taylor, President, San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, San Francisco, California

  Many thanks to the Northern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, to Sisters in Crime, and to my mystery critique group: Jonnie Jacobs, Margaret Lucke, Lynn McDonald, and Sally Richards. Additional thanks to Charlie Ahern, Janet Dawson, Lucy Galen, J.D. Knight, Stacey Norris, Edward and Constance Pike, Geoffrey Pike, and Shelley Singer.

  And very special thanks to Amy Kossow, Linda Allen, Casey Blaine, Cassie Goddard, and Kate Miciak.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About the Author

  “Just set where you are, stranger,

  and rest easy—

  I ain’t going to be gone a second.”

  —Mark Twain

  The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

  I licked the tip of my murder weapon, then hesitantly sipped my mug of coffee as if it were strychnine.

  “Okay, I sneak up behind the principal right after biology, shoot him in the back with the gold-handled derringer, and … shit!” I threw down the pencil and ran my fingers through my bobbed hair.

  You’d think living in a colorful California gold rush town called Flat Skunk, once famous for its early homicidal heritage, I’d be inspired to knock off the high school principal in some innovative way. It was, after all, part of my job.

  I took another swallow of what the Nugget Café served in place of palatable coffee. I tapped my murder weapon on the table, then drew a line through my latest attempt at premeditated homicide, nearly shredding the nugget-imprinted paper napkin I’d embellished with my scrawling.

  “Dammit! I can’t use a gun to kill the principal. Everyone in the school would hear it—even if I wouldn’t,” I said.

  This confession garnered some attention from the regulars at the early morning hangout. Sheriff Elvis Mercer halted mid-conversation with a look that clearly said, “Folks around here don’t talk to themselves out loud, Connor honey. And they especially don’t talk about murdering other folks.”

  I smiled at the sheriff, then took another look at the hopeless mystery puzzle I was creating for my weekly newspaper, and bit into a piece of toast. “OK, I’ll wire the P.A. system so when the principal goes into the office to make an announcement on the microphone about smoking in the bathroom—”

  Zap! I jumped. A hand touched my shoulder and I hadn’t seen it coming.

  It was Lacy Penzance, the self-styled town matriarch, saying something I couldn’t make out; her lips barely moved.

  I turned up the volume on the hearing aid behind my left ear—the only ear that receives any sound at all—hoping it would help with reading her tight lips. To Lacy Penzance, it probably looked like I was scratching fleas.

  “Thorry,” I said, swallowing my bite of toast whole and nearly lacerating my throat in the process. I coughed and slapped my chest a few times. “Sorry. What did you say?” I turned so I could see her face more clearly.

  “I … you are Connor Westphal?” was all I caught.

  I looked her over. I’d never seen her up close, although that wasn’t surprising even in a small town like Flat Skunk. We didn’t have a lot in common, except maybe a love of the historic Mother Lode mining town.

  She was silk suits, Mercedes, Brie, women’s auxiliary; I was torn jeans, beat-up ’57 Chevy, BLT’s, and Protestant work ethic. It all added up to money—opposite sides of the coin. Although we were probably only a few years apart—I’m thirty-seven, she looked fortyish—Lacy Penzance and I were generations apart in dollars and design.

  “May I sit down?”
r />   At least that’s what I thought she said. She really didn’t use her lips for much more than sporting scarlet lipstick. I swept some toast crumbs off the table, folded the mystery-annotated napkin, and gestured to the seat across from mine.

  Lacy slid slowly and deliberately into the worn red leatherette seat. She removed her peach-tinted sunglasses, revealing red-rimmed eyes bordered by tiny crow’s-feet and smudged makeup. There was enough Obsession wafting off her to cause me to lose my appetite, especially for cold toast. But something in the meticulous facade caused me to feel a pang of sympathy for her.

  Nervously, Lacy pulled a wad of carnival tickets from the black hole of her purse and set them on the gray Formica table. She spoke again; I understood very little.

  Even those skilled in lipreading see only thirty to fifty percent of the words on the lips, so there’s a lot of guesswork involved. I usually carry around a little tape recorder in the event I should need something clarified later by an interpreter. But I didn’t have it with me this morning. I like to ease into Mondays. As for my hearing aid, it only helps a little. Without it I tend to hear only very low or very high sounds—bass guitars, car alarms. I often turn it off when I’m trying to write.

  Without taking my eyes off her lips, I could see the tickets twisting in her slim fingers, but her comments didn’t seem to have anything to do with them.

  “You own that little newspaper, the one that circulates throughout the Mother Lode?”

  Little newspaper? Apparently she’d sized me up, too, and didn’t think I looked the part of publishing magnate. Maybe a lone woman in maroon jeans and an old “Oh, My God, I Forgot To Have Children” T-shirt, who talks to herself, wasn’t Lacy Penzance’s idea of a media baron. I sat up straighter to make up for the image problem and slipped my feet back into the pink moccasins I had kicked off.

  “Yes, my office is—”

  She interrupted before I could point across the street. “I know where your office is.” She looked intently into my eyes as she ripped off two tickets, and placed them deliberately on the table.

  I was suddenly aware that we were attracting the attention of some of the Nugget’s other patrons. Although my peripheral vision is no better than a hearing person’s, I’m not distracted by blaring boom boxes and whispered gossip, so I tend to tune in closely to visual cues. I sensed that our pairing had caused some interest in the café.

  Lacy Penzance leaned in closer. “I stopped by there a few minutes ago. The gentleman in the room next to yours said you were here.”

  Gentleman? I must have misread her lips that time. I would not call my office neighbor, Boone Joslin, a gentleman, even when he was clean and sober.

  Jilda Renfrew, part-time waitress with manicurist aspirations, interrupted with a toothy smile much too bright for a Monday morning, and delivered the hot chocolate I had ordered. When Lacy sat back abruptly, I took a moment to pour the chocolate into my half-filled coffee cup. It had been an adjustment, breaking the Starbucks addiction, but the benefits of trading Forty-Niner football tickets for the forty-niner heritage had outweighed the modification. It was a minor change compared to the others I’d made since my move from San Francisco to Flat Skunk.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Penzance?” I asked, after a warming swallow of do-it-yourself mocha.

  Lacy glanced around, licked her lips, then began to speak. I studied her nearly motionless mouth, feeling the onset of a headache from the intense concentration.

  “I can’t talk to you here. Could you buy one of these raffle tickets for the frog-jumping contest this weekend? Everyone will assume that’s what we’re talking about. Then I’ll meet you—” She looked down at her purse and I missed the rest.

  I reached a hand forward. “I’m sorry—what? You’ll meet me …?”

  “I’ve got to go,” she interrupted, suddenly looking a little frantic. “Twenty minutes. In your office. Please. It’s about my sister … she’s missing …”

  I thought that’s what she said anyway. Before I could clarify, she cut me off again and I missed what she said. She had a frustrating habit of interrupting me. It couldn’t have been much—a couple of words—but I was really curious as to what she wanted from me.

  After all, this was Lacy Penzance, widow of Reuben Penzance, former mayor who had recently relocated to Pioneer Cemetery. She was an icon in Flat Skunk, a relic of elegance and wealth from the heydays of the gold rush in this now rustic, gold-stripped town. When she wasn’t selling tickets for charity, Lacy spent most of her time living alone in the Victorian Penzance mansion over on Penzance Street, not far from the renovated Penzance Hotel.

  The storefronts, when not sporting some form of the word “gold” to attract tourists, often featured the name “Penzance”: Penzance Video Rental Store stood next to ’Nother Lode Diaper Service, Penzance Development and Real Estate rented space adjacent to the Slim Chance Health Spa. You couldn’t take two steps without seeing the ubiquitous name.

  In the early 1900’s the Penzance family had attempted to rechristen the town after themselves. But the residents wouldn’t hear of it. The name Flat Skunk lingered like a bad odor. It could have been worse. Many of the original Mother Lode town names are unprintable. The rest are just as creative as Flat Skunk: Gomorrah, Humbug, You Bet, Whiskey Slide, Poker Flat, and Git-Up-And-Git. I’d meet her if only to find out what could be so important that she needed me. Hopefully Jeremiah Mercer, my part-time assistant, would be there to interpret for me. I didn’t want to miss a word.

  “Fine. My office,” I said. I hoped I said it quietly.

  “That will be four dollars, please.” This time I had no trouble reading her lips. Her exaggerated mouth movements were no doubt a performance for the onlookers. So, she was going to stiff me for a pair of frog-jumping tickets I didn’t even want. If it was a scam, she was quite a con artist.

  I forked over the cash and thanked her for the tickets with little enthusiasm. I stuffed them into my jeans pocket as she moved on to the next unsuspecting diners. Curious to see her try to stiff them with her sales technique, I slurped my not-quite-mocha and unfolded the napkin with the mystery puzzle.

  “Got a deadline, Connor?” Sheriff Mercer asked, as he stopped by my table on his way to the cash register. At least, that’s what I thought he said. It wasn’t easy reading his lips with that toothpick dangling from his mouth. Thank God he had given up the tobacco-chewing habit that was so popular around Skunk.

  “Eight thirty-seven in the morning is much too early to be planning the perfect murder, Sheriff. Deadline or no deadline.”

  “Who you gonna kill off this week? I got the one last week. I knew the dentist did it. You never fooled me.” He grinned proudly and tapped the table with a sausage finger.

  “Might as well give it up, Connor. We’ll take care of any mysterious murders that occur around here. You better stick to writing the obituaries.” He hoisted up his khaki pants at the waist and sauntered out the door as if he didn’t have a care in the world. That calm exterior was what made Sheriff Mercer so effective in his job. And damn if he didn’t solve every one of my mystery puzzles.

  I stared out the window at the bubble-gum blossoms of the flowering plums that framed the old Pioneer Cemetery across the way. Those pink puffs gave the crusty old mining town an incongruously delicate fluffy trim, like the cake crumbling with age in Great Expectations. Around here it didn’t matter if I couldn’t hear the hoot of the owls or the rustle of the rivers—I could feel the heartbeat of the forty-niners in the antique town I now called home. I didn’t miss San Francisco a bit; I loved everything about the Mother Lode.

  In the early mining days, murder had been a preferred form of recreation in this Mother Lode town of Flat Skunk. According to my Cornish great-grandmother, Sierra Westphal, 836 gold-diggers were axed, hacked, hanged, shot, or stabbed to death during the five years that followed the 1848 discovery of gold in California. Sierra, or Grancy as my father used to call his grandmother, wrote in her tattered dia
ry: “If you ask me, the mortuary is the real gold mine in this Califoyrna town.” She’s partly responsible for my being here.

  Back then, more brothels and saloons flanked the muddy “gold-paved” streets than all the churches, banks, mortuaries, and jails put together. Today the gold country is part of California’s attic, a tame collection of tourist traps, trendy boutiques, bed-and-breakfast inns, and bogus gold-mining expeditions. About the only threat to safety is stepping into the line of fire of a tobacco-chewing spit-shooter.

  And this coffee.

  “More?” asked Jilda, crinkling up a Cornish nose that was common among long-time residents from Rough & Ready to Angel’s Camp.

  She relaxed her squint and poked at her frizzy, permed hair with sparkling fingernails. I’d made a promise to myself early on not to take her up on her offer of a free introductory manicure. Otherwise I’d probably be sporting bejeweled inch-long acrylic nails, dipped in Neon Magenta.

  “Didja hear me, Con?” she said, raising the coffee pot to illustrate her question.

  “Got an antidote?” I replied as she poured. Before I settled here, I used to think any mouth-breather could work at a diner like the Nugget if they could chew gum while using a pencil and didn’t have cholera. But Jilda’s ability to pour coffee from a height of three feet without spilling a drop had changed one of my many stereotypical attitudes.

  I tried to shake my thoughts back to the matter at hand—my weekly deadline—as I stared at the false front of the hotel across the street. The bucolic picture faded from view as one of the town’s good ol’ boys headed toward the café from across the street. The man’s lumbering gait and self-conscious mannerisms distracted me from the frothy view of the trees and my halfhearted attempt at completing the next mystery puzzle.