Little Murder on the Strip
Summary: Things aren't what they initially seem to be during a murder investigation at a convention, especially once the team realizes the killer is still in the building. GSR, mini-casefile. Set after "A Bullet Runs Through It."
A/N: Technically, this isn't one of the Christmas-challenge fics I've been clearing off my hard drive. The opening and closing lines come from an ancient Unbound challenge. This was my first idea for it, but I realized it would be way too long for that challenge; I came up with "All Cooped Up" for that instead. But I mentioned the idea to Cincoflex, who found it amusing, so I told her I'd write it up.
A/N II: Again, still no beta. If you see anything amiss, feel free to point it out. I'll fix it later.
Disclaimer: This space left blank intentionally.
"That's something you don't see every day," Grissom noted.
Next to him, Sara Sidle's only reaction to his statement was to lift a lone eyebrow as she scanned the crowd before them. Well over two hundred people milled around on the exhibition floor, not counting the various police officers blocking the exits. Besides the officers, women made up the majority of the throng.
And, between them, she estimated they had six hundred pairs of starched petticoats, probably one hundred sunbonnets and at least an acre of gingham. Of the ones not wearing a bonnet or hat of some sort, most had their hair pulled back in a severe style, although she noted there were a surprising number of grown women walking around with their hair braided in pigtails. Just the thought of all those strained corsets made her cringe.
"So, you're saying we should be grateful for small favors?" she ventured, turning to face him.
He cocked his head at her in a curious manner, and she fought back her smile; he would find this intriguing. He loved a mystery to solve, especially one in found in a unique setting. Grissom would relish the slightly bizarre nature of the scene. She also knew he was going to be ecstatic once he noticed the covered wagon in the rear of the room, knowing they weren't going to leave until he had a chance to check it out. She just hoped he wouldn't want to watch another Roy Rogers movie when they got home.
"I told you we should have grabbed breakfast first. We're going to be clocking up the overtime working this case," she said, slipping her camera free and taking crowd shots.
"There are times I think Days save special cases for us to cover for them," Grissom agreed, reading the banners visible over certain areas of the room.
They both turned at the sound of Brass' greeting, sharing a confused look in the process. Normal procedure was for the police to call in CSI support, but it was clear he was just signing in to the scene.
"What's going on, Brass?" Grissom asked as he joined them, the captain's eyes widening as he took in the ocean of old-fashioned dresses.
Brass simply shrugged. "I was told there was a murder here. No one told me it was at an Amish convention."
"These aren't Amish," Grissom said.
"They don't wear gingham," Sara added.
"That's calico, not gingham," he corrected her, again cocking his head as they both stared at him. "Gingham is a checked pattern; calico refers to an inexpensive cotton fabric that usually has a print on it."
"How do you know that?" she challenged with a smile.
"How do you not know that?" Grissom said lightly. "It's our job to know things."
"Yeah? So tell me why there are two detectives on this case," Sara said. She pointed across the hall, and the others watched as Sofia Curtis made her way through the crowd to join them. It was soon clear she wasn't working the case, though, as she wasn't armed or wearing her vest. She also held her right hand away from her body in a determined manner.
"You just happen to be at a historical convention?" Grissom asked in a friendly manner. "Your father would be so proud."
She gave him an odd look. "I don't know about that. My dad is a history teacher. We went to stuff like this all the time when I was a kid," she explained to the others. "I was supposed to be meeting my parents here later for Dad's birthday. I came in the side door, looked in a exhibit room and saw someone on the ground. I checked for a pulse but didn't touch the body otherwise."
"Did you try CPR?" Sara asked, surprising Grissom by snapping several photos of the detective. His surprise grew when Sofia automatically assumed a position that allowed her the best photos.
"No. There was gray matter visible. I had security shut down all the exits immediately, and then I called it in. I've been making sure no one else goes near the scene."
"So, you're our prime suspect. Your mother will be so proud," Sara continued, putting down the camera and opening her case.
Grissom stared in mild disbelief as Sara started processing Sofia's hand. He knew things had been tense between them. The detective had broken protocol by coming to see him during the investigation into Officer Bell's shooting and Sara had to basically chase her out of his office. His confusion grew as he noted the two women were relaxed.
Shrugging off the mystery of women, he used the time to further examine the room. It was clear the lobby area was a staging ground. There were photo displays spread out across the room, and signs indicating which of the other rooms held which events. His face lit up when he saw what appeared to be an authentic Conestoga wagon in a far corner.
"All done," Sara said, tossing her some wipes.
"Thanks. The body's in here," she said, leading the way across the room and down a small hallway. An officer stood in front of one of the doors, stepping aside with a nod as they entered. Sofia stayed in the hallway.
"You did give yourself enough time to ditch the evidence, right?" Sara said lightly.
"Hey, give me some credit! It's not my first homicide."
Catching Grissom's confused look, Sofia laughed. "Relax. I was way out of line when I went to see you during the investigation, but I was too stressed to realize it. I needed someone to snap me back to reality."
"We're cool," Sara said, giving him a nod as she went to photograph the hallway.
Grissom shrugged. If they were joking, then he would take their word everything was fine.
He pulled his flashlight out and ran it around the room before turning it on their victim. The tables in here were covered in an assortment of cookware, mainly cast iron, but some that appeared to be tin and copper. The victim was on the ground behind one of the rear tables. Unlike most of the convention guests, she was dressed in modern clothes – navy dress slacks and a colorful top like the ones Sara preferred.
"I don't think Doc's going to have a hard time determining cause of death," Sara said, as she moved to photograph the victim. "She was hit in the back of the head with something hard."
"Gee, I wonder what the killer used?" Brass said dryly, waving to stacks of heavy cast iron skillets on the table by the victim.
"There's no shortage of potential weapons," Grissom agreed.
"Do we know who she is?" Sara called out to Sofia.
"While I was waiting for you guys, I talked to the organizer – Miss Martha Prewitt Jefferson. She went to fetch the list of vendors for this room. Someone was still setting up," she said, pointing out some partially-emptied boxes.
"So this is a meeting of the 'Little House on the Prairie Appreciation Society of the Great American Desert,'" Brass said, reading a leaflet on the table. "Sofia, no offense, but I never took you for a fan."
She flashed him a quick smile as she leaned in the doorway. "What can I say? Take old, rancid fat, mix it with ashes from a fireplace and you get soap."
"Science nerd," Sara said jokingly.
"Hey, if you spent all your summer vacations crammed into an RV, going to various historical sites, you'd find your entertainment where you could, too."
They paused in their examination at a sharp intake of breath. "Ah, Miss Jefferson," Sofia said. "This is Detective Jim Brass. He'll be investigating. This is Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle from the Crime Lab."
"Oh, gracious!"
Sara's eyebrow rose again as she took in Martha. Her dress was a soft, floral material, but all the lace and trim did little to make it look more flattering. Even without her laced up boots, she would have easily reached six-foot-three, and appeared to be nearly as wide across the shoulders. Her wire-frame glasses rested on a large nose perched over a prominent square jaw, her gray hair pulled back into a tight bun.
In short, Martha was unfortunate enough to look like a villain from a Bugs Bunny cartoon in a very old-fashioned dress.
Sara discreetly snapped Martha's photo as she went around the room, taking overall shots of the crime scene. Whoever had killed their victim had used a great deal of force, and Martha apparently had the strength to do it.
"Do you recognize the victim, Ms. Jefferson?" Brass asked.
"It's 'Miss' Jefferson, sir," she corrected primly in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. "In answer to your question, I know the unfortunate deceased. That is Professor Stacy Adams, I believe from the greater Milwaukee area. She was scheduled as a speaker this afternoon. Oh, gracious."
"Do you know anyone who might have had a grudge against her," Brass asked.
"Oh, dear. I am afraid that list would be rather extensive. The professor was not popular with other members of our society."
"Any special reason why?"
"I suppose one could say the professor was more interested in reality than in popular perceptions," Martha said stiffly.
"What? People who thought the TV show was real," Sara asked.
"At this level, very few of our members are under any delusions about the verity of the television show based somewhat loosely on Mrs. Wilder's esteemed books."
Brass rolled his eyes as he tried to take notes.
"What about people who think the books are accurate?" Sofia asked.
"Who thinks that?" Sara asked. "They're clearly labeled as children's fiction."
Grissom paused in his examination of the stacks of cast iron to give her a curious look.
"I am a female who grew up in America while the show as on, Grissom. I have read the books," she said with a small smirk.
"Same here," Sofia added.
Martha gave a pointed stare. "There are some people who believe the books are autobiographical. While the books were based on her life, there are incidents mentioned in the books that never happened in real life. Likewise, there are many incidents which did happen to Mrs. Wilder that never made it into her published works."
"Would any of those incidents provoke someone to bash her head in?" Grissom asked.
Martha paled and swallowed several times. "Must you leave the poor woman there? Can't you cover her up?"
"We can't touch the body until the coroner's office releases it," Grissom explained kindly. "About those incidents?"
"Oh, I don't know. The members of our society tend to know that the books weren't a true autobiography. They know that Mr. Ingalls once moved the family in the middle of the night to escape a bill collector, for example, or that Mrs. Wilder took liberties with ages."
"Her husband was ten years older than her, right?" Sofia asked.
"Yes, and they married when she was still a teen. It was common at the time and place, but by the time she wrote her novels, it was a touchy subject."
"What about the fact the books were written as a form of anti-New Deal propaganda?" Grissom continued.
"What?" Sara stopped her meticulous photographing of cast iron pots to look up with a surprised expression. "No way!"
"Oh, that is true," Martha said. "The program was very unpopular at the time. Less than half of the people eligible even signed up. Farmers, especially, did not approve of it. They had plenty of work available, and they saw no reason to pay people not to work. Also, no one had helped them in various natural disasters, and they pulled themselves through."
"Not to mention the New Deal policies screwed over a lot of farmers," Sofia added.
"I need to borrow some history books," Sara muttered as she returned to her photography.
"So, would someone kill her over this?" Brass asked.
"Oh, I don't think so. It's not too much of a surprise." Martha chose her next words carefully. "Professor Adams was more interested in facts which call into question aspects of Mrs. Wilder's accomplishments."
Brass let out a gruff chuckle. "So what are you saying? That America's sweetheart was a bitch in real life?"
In apparent defiance of all natural laws, Martha straightened her back even more, scowling over her wire-frame glasses at him. "We most certainly are not!"
The detective had an impatient expression. "Look, pal, you might be a queen, fine, but you ain't Victoria. Drop the accent, okay? It's giving me a headache."
Martha gave him a shocked stare for a moment before giving her head a quick shake. A hand reached up to remove the wig, revealing a mass of curly, red hair.
"Oh, hey, sorry about that. Get caught up in character, ya know? Real name's Paulie DeMarco," he said in a thick Bronx accent. His voice was still amazingly high-pitched in stark contrast to his size. He started to take off one of his boots, revealing an old tube sock covering an exceedingly hairy leg. "Damn, these heels are a real pain in the keister, if you'll pardon my French, ladies."
"Don't take that off," Grissom called out. "You'll contaminate our scene."
"Sorry about that. For both of us. Fellows, I'm serious. You gotta gal you're special on, don't ever ask her to wear these things. Am I right, ladies, or am I right? It's like I told my Trixie, if you want to dress up for me, less is better."
Sara bit her lip to stop from laughing at Grissom's expression.
"So what's the deal? You can't sell if you aren't a lady or something?" Brass said, attempting to regain control of the questioning.
"That's about it. I been doing this gig for years. Started out part-time, just for fun at first. But I started making enough to do it all the time. It wasn't a problem when it was all mail order or over the Internet, but when the shows started getting big? You might have noticed there's a lot of little old ladies out there. No one wanted to deal with someone who looked or sounded like me. Thought I was a fraud," Paulie said. "Ain't it disgusting the way people judge ya on your looks?"
"It is," Grissom said, a hint of a smile on his lips. "What exactly is your 'gig'?"
"I sell historical stuff from the pioneer days, mainly. Run a small magazine. Organize shows. I love all this."
"You do?" Brass asked with a hint of humor.
"Hey, I got six baby sisters. I musta read those books to them a hundred times growing up. Trust me, you grow up in a cramped tenement with an extended family, and you'd love a story about fresh air, wide-open prairies and room to stretch without poking somebody in the belly."
"Yeah, I bet you needed a bit of room to stretch," Brass said.
"I'm the runt. My four brothers are all bigger than me," he chuckled. "Seriously, reading about those times was fascinating to me. Started reading more about it, too. Pioneer diaries, stuff by Ole Edvart Rølvaag."
"Giants in the Earth," Sofia said, tilting her head as she recalled the information. "Bit of a slog to read, if I remember."
"Guy wrote it in Norwegian first. It was translated to English later. Their literary, whatchamacallit, conventions are different. Good book, though. It was wild to think of a place so isolated it drove people insane, dontcha know?"
"Prairie madness," Grissom said. "The first pioneers on the prairies suffered it. Modern psychologists think it was a mix of cabin fever and depression brought on by lack of human contact."
"Sounds like something you'd love," Brass quipped and this time Sara did smile at Grissom.
Paulie let out a grunt of relief as he shifted himself, flashing Sara an embarrassed grin when he noticed her looking. "Dem girdles are a bitch, ain't they?"
"I wouldn't know."
His smiled widened as he gave her an appraising look. "No, I bet you don't. Say, I don't suppose you get to date someone you meet on the job, do you?"
"'Fraid not."
"Figures," he sighed, catching sight of Sofia in the doorway and flashing her a big grin.
"Sorry, I don't date guys with nicer dresses than mine."
"It's just the one dress," he cajoled.
"Can you wait to flirt until we're done investigating the dead body?" Brass asked with an amused tone.
"Oh, gosh! I'm so sorry," Paulie said, a blush covering his entire face. "I ain't never seen a body before. Well, not like that."
The others exchanged looks. "You've seen bodies before, Mr. DeMarco? When?" Grissom asked.
"Call me Paulie, pal. Uh, is it a body if it ain't got no body left? I mean, I was a pipe fitter before I started this gig. We were replacing a big section of sewer and there were these skeleton bits and stuff. My first thought was someone had flushed some old Halloween decorations."
Brass gave a small shrug as he continued questioning. "What, exactly, did our victim do that was so upsetting to the others?"
"Do you know about Rose?" Sara and Sofia nodded, while Grissom and Brass shook their heads. "Laura's daughter was Rose Wilder Lane. Nowadays, not too many people know her except she was one of the founders of the Libertarian Party. But back in the day, she was hot stuff."
"In what way?" Brass asked.
"She was a writer. World famous, in fact. The advances on her magazine interviews and stories were fetching the equivalent of high six figures in today's money, and that was during the Great Depression. She was friends with all kinds of bigwigs – kings, presidents, actors, captains of industry, as they say."
"Okay," Brass said, waving his hand to encourage him to get to the point.
"So, anyway, Rose wrote to all these people. All the time. And her handwriting wasn't that great, so she typed her letters. And she kept carbon copies. So, she had copies of the full conversations. And she kept every piece of correspondence she had. When she died, her attic was crammed with trunks full of them."
"A historian's dream," Sofia said with a small smile.
"Yeah, well, there was so much stuff it took years after she died before anyone started to go through it and organize it and stuff. And then a researcher found Rose's correspondence with her mom," Paulie said, "and what he found was a bit of a shock."
"Rose wrote the books," Sofia stated simply. "Haven't people suspected that for years?"
Paulie refused to commit, shaking his head from side to side as he pondered his answer. "People always knew Rose edited the books. There's no question of that. The rough drafts Laura donated to a library and the finished draft were way too different."
"And no publisher would touch her autobiography even at the height of her fame," Sofia added. "It's missing all the detail and emotional connections that made the children's books so popular."
"It's pretty boring. 'We went here. We ate dinner there. We met this family.' It's nothing like the books," he agreed. "But the letters showed proof that Laura was supplying very rough work, and Rose was generating the final product."
"What's the line between editing and ghostwriting?" Sofia asked rhetorically. "And wasn't ghostwriting considered sort of … undesirable back then?"
"Yeah, Rose never would have admitted to it. She did a lot of it for magazines, but it wasn't something the general public knew. It would have ruined her reputation as a serious writer."
"And you think someone would kill the professor over that?" Brass asked.
Paulie shrugged. "Hey, people get touchy about their fandoms. There's this lady neurology professor in California who writes some whacked out fan fiction. I don't think I'd like to challenge her feelings on it, ya know what I mean?"
"The word 'fan' is short for fanatic," Grissom said, never looking up as he moved to examine the next pile of cast iron.
"Is that so?" he asked, turning to Sara.
"Yep," she said, smirking briefly at Grissom as she moved to his side.
"You're one sharp cookie," Paulie said with another appreciative smile. He then turned suddenly to Grissom. "Hey, do you know where that comes from? 'Cause, I gotta tell ya, a sharp cookie sounds dangerous, ya know? A little kid could get cut on that."
"Paulie, focus," Brass said. "Was anyone making threats against the professor?"
"Not that I know about. It was more people didn't like her. She was kind of a know-it-all, not to speak ill of the dead and such," he said, frowning after a bit. "But, well, there are some weirdos out there, take it too far and stuff."
"Hi, guys! Wow, big crowd here today," Dave said as he entered the room with his assistant and gurney. It only took him a moment to start work. "Cause of death seems pretty obvious, but we'll have to make sure nothing else happened to her. Hmm, she's fresh. Time of death was less than an hour ago. I'd say less than thirty minutes."
Grissom's head snapped up quickly, and he turned to Sofia. "On your way in, did you pass anyone going out?"
"No, and security shut the building down immediately," she said. "I found the body within minutes of her death."
"The next closest exit that isn't a fire escape is the main entry," Brass said. "No way someone walked that far through that crowd."
"The killer is still in here," Grissom stated.
TBC