Sir Arthur Annals Book II

By James Ray

The continuing adventures in Northwest North Carolina of my brother who we refer to as Sir Arthur in reference to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. A light and humorous series of anecdotes destined to bring a smile to the reader who enjoys short stories, especially those grounded in country humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Ray
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370375608

James Ray

Born in Detroit, Michigan, we moved down south to the mountains of northwest North Carolina where I attended eighth grade and high school. After a shortened semester and a half expirament at Arizona State University, I joined the US Marine Corps where I spent the next nearly five years with an abbreviated tour in Viet Nam. A lifelong tinkerer of poetry I finally published a collected volume of verse, Cosmos Clouds. I now spend time amusing myself writing poetry and short stories including a collection of case studies in the Annals of Sir Arthur, My Brother Who Would Be Sherlock. Married now for over 30 years, we split our time between the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Western Nebraska.

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The Sir Arthur Annals

My Brother Who Would be Sherlock

Book II

by James Ray

Copyright 2015 by James Ray

Smashwords Edition

I have taken to living by my wits.

Sherlock Holmes –The Musgrave Ritual.

Characters, names and incidents used in this book are products of the imagination of the author and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental or used fictitiously.

The continuing adventures of sleuth Sir Arthur as he sorts out mysteries in North Carolina, Michigan and the Arizona desert.

Table of Contents

Parking Ticket

Assassin

Sty-mied Swine

Fiddle-Fuddled

Fiddle-Fuddled Part II

Purloined Painting

Ostraca Puzzle

Escape From Punster Asylum

Betty Martin’s Mysterious Departure

Catch Me If You Can

Lost Dutchman Treasure Hunt

Mountain Aire Mischief

Bigfoot

Kingslayer Confession

Christmas Thief

The Bank Dick

Coming Soon

About the Author

Parking Ticket

I boarded the American Airlines flight from Phoenix to Charlotte feeling pretty good about myself for scoring a window seat which I always preferred when flying. What I wasn’t prepared for was the noise. We were flying in a Boeing MD-80 airplane and the jet engines were located up against the fuselage and my seat was situated at the jet engine intake. Looking out the window, I felt like I could reach out and touch it. During takeoff, the noise was deafening. I was sure that whoever designed this aircraft never sat in the seat I was occupying. Not during flight anyways. Don’t even get me started about leg room and I’m not even six feet tall.

We arrived in Charlotte without incident and in no time at all I was in my Budget rental car zipping along I-77 for a two-hour ride into the mountains of northwestern North Carolina.

This was my first trip back since we put our mother in a nursing home three months ago. As much as we hated to admit it, we could no longer provide her the care she needed especially with her advanced stages of broad spectrum dementia brought on by a series of strokes she suffered over the last few years. Widowed at the age of forty-eight, she had lived a very active and independent life and now, confined to a hundred square foot room it’s no wonder she felt imprisoned. That didn’t help assuage our guilt by any stretch of the imagination. We spent six months convincing ourselves that this was the right decision, and she managed to completely undermine our confidence in twenty minutes on her first day in the nursing home. Unfortunately, there was no turning back now.

Bringing her back from Denver to North Carolina where we grew up put her in an environment where she would have a lot of family to frequently visit her. I was prepared to make three to four trips a year from Arizona to spend time with her as well. We all knew it wasn’t an ideal situation, but given our financial constraints, we felt it was the best we could hope for at the time.

Conversations with somebody who suffers from dementia can go in either of two ways. On a good day, you can carry on a fairly normal conversation—as long as you stick to the past. On a bad day, well, let’s just say you spent a lot of time listening to foolishness; often repeated foolishness. I found that she was more comfortable talking about the past rather than the present and usually guided my conversation with her in that direction. There’s no point in trying to add to her confusion by engaging in something in which she has no comprehension. I was also thinking about all of the different conversations we had through the years, everything from politics to religion to business and no matter how we may have agreed or disagreed, we always respected each other’s opinions. Another dimension of dementia is that along with continuous repetition whatever you talked about one day she was sure to forget the next.

All these thoughts and more concerning my guilt were going through my mind as I made the drive from Charlotte to Ashe County. By the time I pulled into the parking lot of Margate where mother now called home my Catholic-bred guilt had reached a crescendo. I parked my rental car and went inside to find Mother who was predictably sitting in her easy chair in her little room she now called home—well, sort of with much protestation; more like a jail cell she often said. She was sitting there just staring at the walls.

Who’s that? she called out when I knocked and entered. Who are you?

Jimmy, I said, Remember me? I continued tongue in cheek. In addition to dementia, she also was blind in one eye and could barely see out of the other one.

Jimmy? Jimmy who?

You know, James from Arizona, your son. There for a moment I’d forgotten that mother abhorred nicknames and insisted on calling me by my formal name, James. It was an un-German name; a miscue to her Polish/German heritage but keeping with the Catholic tradition of naming your children after a saint—not that I was a saint or anything like that. Everybody else called me Jimmy while I preferred the more simple, Jim.

"Oh, hi James. When did you get here?

Just now. Came to see how you’re doing. I pulled up the spare chair from the corner of the room and positioned myself relatively close to her so that she could see me without any undue difficulties. Mother didn’t look so good I thought to myself. Her hairpiece (don’t call it a wig, she admonished—no, rather demanded) was awry and her clothes were disheveled. I know the staff did the best they could, especially considering the situation they worked in and the place was probably understaffed and they were definitely underpaid not to mention that Mother could be downright difficult.

Has anybody been to see you lately? I inquired.

No, nobody ever comes to see me anymore. I haven’t been to church at all in months. Nobody comes by to take me to church anymore. This I knew was not true from talking with my brothers, but hey who am I to argue? I remember when growing up we never missed church; and I mean never, come hell or high water or deep snow. And from her conversations I heard many times how she used to go to church daily when she lived in Detroit. So I knew how important it was for her to attend church.

Well shame on them, I said. I’ll see what I can do about it. I’ll talk to the priest and make sure somebody stops by every Sunday. Even so, I already knew that they regularly stopped by every Sunday afternoon to see her.

Been watching any baseball? That was really a silly question since her eyesight prohibited her from operating the remote control; besides that, she never mastered the television remote technology and relied on others to manage what little TV she watched which usually amounted to a baseball game or bowling.

No, I can’t figure out how to operate this darn remote. As you know, I don’t watch much television anymore. When Arthur comes over, he likes to watch bowling so I watch bowling with him when he’s here. I used to be a pretty good bowler at one time. I carried a 142 average during the war, you know, the big one WW2.

I was trying to remember. Didn’t you take Auntie to one of the World Series games? When was that, 1945? I seem to be stuck on baseball today for conversation topics.

After a long moment of thought she replied, Yeah, yeah, it was in ’45 the year the war ended but we didn’t get to go to any of the World Series games that year. You couldn’t get a ticket for love or money. They were sold out. It had been ten years since the Tigers won the championship when the beat the Chicago Cubs in 1935 and the city was in a baseball frenzy as you can imagine with the end of the war. Auntie’s boss at the Packard plant gave her two tickets to the first game of a double header on a Wednesday in late September before the start of the World Series against the Cleveland Indians. Hank Greenberg hit a home run in an 11-0 rout. I remember reading in the newspaper the next day that Hal Newhouser pitched his eighth shutout of the year. That pretty much secured first place for the Tigers. By the way, the Tigers won fifty out of seventy six games at Briggs Stadium that year.

We sat in silence for a while, neither one of us wanting to break the spell. Sometimes it was amazing when you think of some the details she could recall.

That was some year the Tigers had. It would be another twenty-three years before they would win the World Series again.

We sat there for a few minutes and I could tell she was pondering something in her mind.

Auntie lived in Hamtramck and it was only about a six mile drive to Corktown where Briggs Stadium was located. I remember Daddy talking about how the city moved Cherry Street so that Walter Briggs could expand the old Navin Field, which was located at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Trumbull Avenue. Mr. Briggs wanted to build a double deck out in left field which would expand the stadium capacity to over fifty thousand fans; this was in 1938. Daddy said that they used to call it The Corner back in the old days. Do you know why they called it Corktown?

No, I’m afraid not. I never knew. She was on a roll now.

In the mid nineteenth century Ireland was experiencing the Great Irish Potato Famine.

Now that, I do remember reading about, I added.

The Irish, especially the shanty Irish, moved to this country in droves back then. For some reason a lot of them settled in the West side of Detroit and most of them hailed from County Cork in Ireland and thus, the neighborhood became known as Corktown. So many of the Irish moved into the area that Corktown was for many years the most populous neighborhood of Detroit. The Germans and Polish in Hamtramck, of course, avoided the Irish like the plague back then.

We sat there for a long time and mother nodded off. I was thinking about leaving when she came out of her reverie and said, Those damn Irish cops gave us a parking ticket that day when we went to the Tigers’ baseball game. Can you believe that? A parking ticket! Whoever heard of such a thing? Well, Auntie got in a huff and refused to pay it.

How much was the parking ticket fine back then?

You want to hear something funny?

Sure.

I’ve still got that old parking ticket. When we put Auntie in a nursing home, much like you all did to me (was that a criticism? I wondered) my brother Norb and I were going through her things in her house and I came across that parking ticket. Norb and I got a real laugh out of that. On a lark, I stuck the ticket in my missal and forgot all about it until just now. Reach over in that drawer and get me my Daily Missal. Let’s see if it’s still there.

I got up and went over to the bedside table and retrieved her well-worn missal from the back of the drawer and handed it over to mother. It bulged, stuffed as it was with a lot of old papers, articles and so on that she had saved over the years.

Yes, yes, here it is right here, she said handing an old yellowed parking ticket over to me. There it was, a parking ticket dated Wednesday, September 26, 1945. The fine was for ten cents.

Ten cents! I practically shouted. Can you believe that? The last parking ticket I got in downtown Denver cost me five dollars. Ha! Ten Cents. Imagine that, ten cents for a parking ticket.

You know, you ought to call them up and pay it just to see what they’ll say, mother said with a twinkle in her eye. I would sure rest easy knowing all my bills have been paid.

The stamp alone would cost forty-two cents if I mailed it in. I reasoned.

We both got a chuckle out of that. Say, do you mind if I take this? I think I will call them up and see how I can go about paying this fine. That way you can rest easy knowing that all your bills have been paid, I laughingly avowed. Now I realized that I was beginning to repeat stuff much like Mother.

Yeah, you do that James and let me know what they say.

We sat there both lost in our own thoughts and soon Mother dozed off and I quietly got up and left her room. I have been noticing over the past few years how even just a little conversation, not to mention excitement wears her out.

I went over to Sir Arthur’s house where I would be staying for the next couple of days while I was in town. We sat around talking, catching up on all the family gossip, politics and mixed fortunes of the local high school football and baseball teams. I showed Sir Arthur the parking ticket his ma and Auntie got when they went to the Tiger baseball game back in 1945 and we got a big kick out of that. For grins we got on the internet and checked into parking ticket fines and policies in Detroit.

"Hey, check this out Sir Arthur exclaimed.

I leaned over and read the news article that he had accessed. In brief, it stated that the Detroit Municipal Parking Department was extending their ticket program because of the success they had in collecting past due revenue. The article went on to say that drivers with unpaid parking tickets will be given a fifty-percent discount on the total amount owed if they paid their fine by June 20th. The catch was that the program only pertained to tickets that were issued before May 29, 2008.

We’ve got less than a week to get this paid, I observed. That means she only owes a nickel, eh? The article gave a number to call and the address of the Municipal Parking Department on 10th Street. I’m going to give them a call and see what they say.

We thought nothing more of it for the rest of the weekend. On Monday morning I called the Detroit Municipal Parking Department and after being put on hold for an interminable amount of time, an agent finally got on the line. I explained what the situation was and asked her what the process was for me to pay this parking ticket and since the original parking ticket fine was ten cents, I expected the fine to be reduced to five cents after the discount that I read about being offered by the Municipal Parking Department. Soon I realized that I was talking to the dial tone. She’d hung up on me.

I called back and after waiting on hold for twenty-six minutes (this time I timed them) I got another agent on the phone. Monday must be busy times for them I mused aloud. I explained my predicament and asked her what the best way for me to handle paying for this parking ticket. After a long pause, she said, You’ve got to be kidding me?

I went on to explain how mother and Auntie got this ticket when they went to a Detroit Tigers baseball game back in 1945 and how it had been forgotten over the years. I also said that she was in her final days and wanted to pay off all her debts so that she could have peace of mind knowing that she didn’t burden her family with any debts. The woman I was talking to, she had identified herself as Wanda, was convinced that this was some kind of practical joke and repeatedly told me that there was nothing she could do about it, that it didn’t show up on her computer.

We went back and forth; I must have explained my situation a half a dozen times before Wanda finally said that she had to handle a more compelling crisis and hung up on me.

Refusing to give up, I went online and booked a round trip flight to Detroit for the following morning and rental a car for the day. When Sir Arthur saw what I was doing, he asked me to book a flight for him as well. The two round trip tickets came to fifteen hundred and sixty dollars. The car rental was thirty-four dollars, making the cost of our trip just under sixteen hundred dollars.

That to pay off a ten cent parking ticket; before the fifty percent discount, of course.

The next morning we drove down to Charlotte and boarded a US Airways flight to Detroit. We arrived in mid-morning and after going through the car rental paperwork and headaches, we were on our way to downtown Detroit. It took us a while but we finally found the Municipal Parking Department at 1001 10th Street, parked the car (legally, of course) put some money in the parking meter and went inside.

We had to take a number and sat down to wait our turn which took over a half an hour. When our number was called we went over to the prescribed desk and took a seat. I produced the parking ticket (and a copy that I had made, just in case) and proceeded to explain the situation to the gentleman whose name tag said, Duncan. When I got finished with my story (including my two telephone conversations with Wanda and the other agent) as Duncan scanned the copy of the parking ticket, I asked him, So Duncan, how can we resolve this situation?

Duncan excused himself and said that he had to take this matter up with his manager and disappeared into a back office leaving us sitting there at his desk. We sat there and patiently waited; and waited. And waited some more. I should have checked the time to see how long we had to wait but it didn’t occur to me that it would take so long.

Duncan returned with his manager who he introduced to us as Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones sat down and asked us again what was going on and I proceeded to tell him in great detail the story behind the parking ticket, mother’s wish to pay her debts and our frustrations in trying to clear up the matter at hand. He sat there and silently looked at us for a long moment. He turned to Duncan and said, Write out a receipt to Mrs. Ray for five cents. Turning to us he asked, I don’t suppose you will let me have the original?

No sir, mother wanted to keep the original but you are welcome to keep the copy we made.

I reached in my pocket and realized that I didn’t have any change on me. I asked Sir Arthur if he had a nickel and he said that he didn’t have any change either, that he had put all of his change in the parking meter. I turned to Duncan and asked, Do you have change for a dollar?

Duncan looked over at me like I was some kind of crazy lunatic, took my dollar and went over to the cashier and returned shortly with my ninety-five cents in change. I took the receipt, thanked him and Sir Arthur and I left the Municipal Parking Department.

Mission accomplished.

When we got to the car, the parking meter had expired and the meter maid wasted no time writing us out a parking ticket. I’m not going inside and go through that hassle again, I said.

Why don’t we just mail them a check? Sir Arthur chuckled. I agreed.

We drove over to look at the weed-infested empty field that used to be Tiger stadium, shook our heads in disgust and after taking a few pictures we drove back to the airport to await our flight back to North Carolina.

When we got back to the county, we stopped off at Roses department store and bought a picture frame to mount the parking ticket and receipt. The next day when I was back at the nursing home to see mother, I showed her the framed parking ticket and receipt and told her that she could rest easy now that the parking ticket had been paid.

What parking ticket are you talking about? she wondered aloud.

Assassin

"What do you make of this note I found taped to the window of my pickup truck this morning, James?"

I was lounging on the back patio of our Rayfield Acres Estate, as we liked to humorously refer to our recently built humble abode situated on Aunt Gertrude’s back forty. An early morning breeze carried the black cloud created by my Virginian cigarillo off to annoy Alfred our neighbor to the east who had no appreciation for a fine cigar experience; who in fact complained often and bitterly of our drinking and smoking pleasures—too often to no avail. I reached up and took the proffered note and read, Catch me if you can which was followed by a fancy red printed ‘S’ with an upward arrow through it. It’s definitely a challenge, eh Sir Arthur? The note came on a paper that was folded in half and when I re-folded the paper I noticed a strange symbol. What do you make of this symbol?

That’s an ancient assassin creed symbol. You know where the term assassin comes from, don’t you?

Something Arabic, I think.

The term assassin is commonly used nowadays to describe a hired killer or a cutthroat. The term has paved the way for another expression assassination, which denotes any action involving murder of a targeted person for political reasons. The origins of the Assassins trace back to just before the First Crusade around 1080. There has been a lot of difficulty finding out much information about the origins of the Assassins because most early sources are either written by enemies of the order or based on legends, or both. Most sources dealing with the order's inner working were destroyed with the capture of Alamut, the Assassins' headquarters, by the Mongols in 1256. However, it is possible to trace the beginnings of the cult back to its first Grandmaster, Hassan-i Sabbah. A passionate devotee of Isma'ili beliefs, Hassan-i Sabbah was well-liked throughout Cairo, Syria and most of the Middle East by other Isma'ili, which led to a number of people becoming his followers. Using his fame and popularity, Sabbah founded the Order of the Assassins. While his motives for founding this order are ultimately unknown, it was said to be all for his own political and personal gain and to also exact vengeance on his enemies. He had established a secret society of deadly assassins, which was built in a hierarchical format. Below Sabbah, the Grand Headmaster of the Order, were those known as ‘Greater Propagandists’, followed by the normal ‘Propagandists’, the Rafiqs (‘Companions’), and the Lasiqs (‘Adherents’). It was the Lasiqs who were trained to become some of the most feared assassins, or as they were called, ‘Fida'I’ (self-sacrificing agent), in the known world.

So you’re thinking that we’re looking at an assassination plot?

You know James I don’t like to jump to conclusions without having sufficient information so as to form an educated opinion. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that your assumption may be correct. Then we have two questions before us. First of all, why here? Who in Ashe County would fit the profile of an assassin? Who would be brazen enough to taunt us with this challenge? Secondly, who could possibly be the intended target?

Not to demean anybody but who in Ashe County would present an appropriate assassination target? Is there anybody that important hereabouts?

Assassination is primarily a term that is associated with a political figure—often a head of state–as opposed to simply murder. In popular context, the president for example is a popular target—or even an ex-president as in the case of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Rummaging through a stack of daily newspapers from Charlotte and Winston-Salem that Sir Arthur liked to read and keep on hand, he found what he was looking for, turned to the inside page and read, ‘Next week (on your birthday no less) President Jimmy Carter is going to be in Wilson, North Carolina at a Democratic Party rally for John Ingram.’ There you have it. A perfect assassination target right here in our state."

Isn’t Wilson the site of the new North Carolina Baseball Museum?

One and the same.

Reckon Monte Weaver as the county’s only honorand in major league baseball has a place of distinction there?

We just might have to drive down there and see for ourselves. But first we need to track down the source of this note. I already dusted it for fingerprints and there weren’t any. The first order of business is to go the library and get a list of everybody who has been trained as an Army sniper and check them out one by one. While you’re at the library I’m going to do a little research here. Sir Arthur said that because of his longstanding avoidance of anything to do with the library that he developed early on in high school.

Why an army sniper? I wondered.

That ‘S’ with an arrow slash is the unofficial and often denied logo of the Sniper School located at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Oh, I see.

After about an hour in the library I found sixteen soldiers from Ashe County who were stationed at Fort Benning at one time or another in recent memory. Of those sixteen, three had a record of attending the Sniper School. This was too easy I thought to myself. After another half an hour of research I determined that of the three names that I had, one was presumably deceased, one was living somewhere in the wilds of Oregon with some survivalist group and the third name, Gerald or Jerry Ramey’s whereabouts were unknown. When I got back to the house and went over my findings with Sir Arthur he had an interesting observation. The name Rami in Arabic means marksman or in some contexts, it could connote sniper.

Wasn’t there a Ramey kid on Central’s basketball team? And didn’t he play in our softball league?

And as I recall, he was mightily upset when he learned about you and Richard’s little trophy escapade. Is he still in the Army?

His whereabouts are unknown, as far as I could tell from the information available in the library.

Hand me the phone and I’ll see if I can find out. After getting transferred to several different offices at Fort Benning, Sir Arthur finally talked to an office clerk at the United States Army Marksmanship Unit. Specialist 4 Ramey served a 120-day TDY (temporary duty assignment) within the past year as an instructor before returning back to his unit, the Panthers of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A few phone calls later, Sir Arthur learned that