Page 32 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

keep it on. Which he did. Mr. Ewidge’s hat was a seven and an
eighth; Ronny Knowles takes a size six.”
“How on earth did you discover that?”
“Oh, I just had a look at the equipment in the gym. Ronny lettered
in baseball, you know, and Mr. Ewidge was a coach. It wasn’t difficult
finding an excuse to get in the locker room and compare their caps.”
I shook my head, trying to clear it. “So he pushed Mr. Ewidge over
the edge—”
“After cracking him on the head with a large rock—which he
tossed after the body.”
“—but kept his hat and shirt and specimen bag so he could create
that deception. You and Sherrie appeared as scheduled, and he
pretended to trip over a protruding tree root while directing your
attention away from himself. But you actually saw him fall: how could
he fake that?”
Labelle smiled, showing a pair of rather wolfish eyeteeth. “I
wondered a long time about that, Mr. Holloman. After checking the
movements of all the students at the park during the field trip, I
figured that he could have easily returned to the parking lot before
the police started up there to search for the body. So all he had to do
was jettison the shirt, hat and specimen bag, wait a minute or two for
Sherrie and me to leave our vantage point, then climb back up his
bungee cord, pack it up and run.”
“His what?”
“It’s a kind of elastic rope the army uses to drop tanks by
parachute. The inside of the rope is rubber and the outside is nylon.
It stretches and slows the fall of whatever is attached to the lower
end. I think the only place you will see one outside an army base is in
a circus act. Probably that’s where Ronny saw it.”
“And he was able to hide it from you when he jumped?”
“Yes. He had it coiled up on the far side of the tree, out of our line
of vision. One end was tied to his foot and the other anchored to the
trunk near its base. That left those marks we found the other day.”
I blinked, wondering at the audacity of the plot. “Have you ever
seen one of those trick ropes before?”
“No. I suppose they could become a fad, like hula hoops, but most
kids don’t know what they are yet. And he carried it away from there
right under our noses. All we needed to bring was a small canvas bag

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