Sam Saint Cloud Mysteries

By Robert Jones

Sam Saint Cloud was the closest thing Bartonsville had to the law. Bartonsville was an out of the way village deep in the Pocono Mountains that time seemed to have forgotten and was home to a ragtag collection of Pennsylvania Germans, Lenni Lenape and those from the distant cities of New York and Philadelphia who wanted to get away from their pasts. Beyond the range of most cell towers and of little interest to cable providers, the village existed in relative isolation and infamy and was a magnet for long-haul truckers and fans of roadside porn. Sam handled every kind of case from burglary to murder. Seated behind the wheel of his sometimes trusty 1969 Buick Skylark, he crisscrossed the Poconos and beyond in pursuit of clues for his cases, and wherever he went, crime never seemed far away. Regardless, from the seedy streets of Albany, New York to the hard flagstone sidewalks of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, Sam never tired in his quest for justice, even if that meant turning a blind eye to the law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Jones
• Release date: Jul 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201143985

Robert Jones

Robert Jones graduated from London University with a degree in Zoology. He joined Unilever as a graduate trainee working in their advertising agency -Lintas International. He also worked at the London offices of SH Benson, Young & Rubicam, and McCann Erickson before finally joining CPM in Oxfordshire. His last corporate position before setting up his own consultancy was as a business development director within the WPP Group. He has experience in many markets and has worked with a wide range of major corporate companies. He has been awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Geographic Society, and is also a Fellow of the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management. He now runs a successful photography and publishing business. His photographic work can be seen on his website www.robertjones.com

Book preview

The Case of the Last Night of Lavender in Bartonsville

Sam Saint Cloud was a big man, just shy of six feet tall and just under 250 pounds.  His presence filled the Taproom at the Forest Inn like his body filled his beige overcoat.  His face was red, and his shaggy, strawberry blond hair was wet from the pouring rain as he stood staring down at Hattie Fish. She wore a dark blue dress and had her gray hair pulled back in a bun. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and Hattie had come from her job in the post office next door for her afternoon snort of Pocono Creek Gin.  At nearly 90, Hattie was the village gossip, and Sam knew she was holding back on him.

All right, Hattie, out with it. You told Menna Lloyd that you saw someone coming out of Supervisor Greunzwig's house at 5:30 on your way to bingo at the dance hall.  Fess up!

He towered over her like a grizzly, but she wasn't moved.  She only had another ten minutes on her self-appointed break, and she needed two more snorts before she could haul her aging carcass back to her place behind the post office window.

Look, Saint Cloud, you ain't the law, and I ain't tellin' you jack. Go shake down Old Man Pensyl or something, would ya?

It was true. Sam wasn't the law, but he was the closest thing Bartonsville had to it. Twelve years before, the villagers met at the dance hall and unofficially voted to make their local private eye their local, albeit, unofficial sheriff. Bartonsville had a unique and inauspicious political situation. In Pennsylvania the term village denotes an unincorporated settlement in a municipality called a township.  Bartonsville's problem was that it wasn't in just one township, but four.  The almost right angled borders of Hamilton, Jackson, Pocono and Stroud townships each held a piece of the village. None of the four townships ever really wanted to take responsibility for the nefarious little burg and generally turned a blind eye to its woes.  Aside from its quaint village center, its eastern outskirts that lay in Hamilton Township were home to a string of notorious adult bookstores, and just beyond them in Stroud Township the trucking business, with all of its curious swashbucklers, had ensconced itself like a diesel fueled, paved over cancer.  The middle class and tonier districts found themselves in Pocono and Jackson Townships.  The village was split up among the townships like Berlin after the war.

Sam was squeezing the old lady for some dirt on Supervisor Artie Greunzwig. He was a Pocono Township official who happened to live on Bartonsville Avenue, the relatively posh thoroughfare that headed north from the Lackawanna Trail, the main street of the village.  His home was a pleasant cobblestone and red cedar shake cottage across from the dance hall. It sat on a rise with a lovely view across the fields behind the hall and over to the Pocono Creek that flowed languidly through the countryside making its way to meet the Brodhead on the border between Stroudsburg, the county seat, and East Stroudsburg some miles away.  Publicly he had been pushing for a regional police force to oversee the village, and by all appearances it looked like he was going to have his way until he ended up taking a dirt nap.

His house keeper, Molly Kresge, found his body when she came to work.  He had been shot once at point-blank range with a small caliber handgun.  Two days after his body was found, Menna Lloyd reported to everyone in the Taproom that Hattie Fish told her she saw someone leave the house as she entered the dance hall to set up the grocery bingo.

Sam put a Hamilton down on the bar and smiled at Hattie.  That was enough for ten shots of Pocono Creek Gin. C'mon, Hattie, who did you see?

Hattie thought for a minute. She didn't want to get wrapped up in Sam's case; then again ten Pocono Creek Gins would put a smile on her face.

It was some woman. I dunno who, so don't ask. I ain't never seen her before.  She was tall and all dolled up like a movie star. I thought to myself, 'Well ain't old Groonie gettin' high up?' Probably found her on that internet thing for all I know. They wasn't fightin', I'll tell ya that.  They was just parting company like anyone.  Groonie had a kinda sheepish look on his face, so I figure they was weaseling.

Weaseling?

Yeah, you know, clearing a blocked drain! With this, she slammed her hand down on the counter so hard the bands of her four diamond rings left dents in the bar, and she laughed like an octogenarian hyena. Sam rolled his eyes, but at least he got some sort of a clue out of the old crank. He turned and walked out of the Taproom and into the driving rain.  His car was parked alongside the Forest Inn; the Inn was a rambling old place built in the 1880's at the intersection where Bartonsville Avenue crossed the Lackawanna Trail and changed names to old Route 12 as it headed south off the Pocono Plateau and down to Snydersville in the foothills.

He pulled out and down the Trail making for the Strip, the seedy east side of the village in Hamilton and Stroud townships.  He wanted to play a hunch and see if this well-dressed dame was frequenting the truckers at all. He spent the rest of the afternoon keeping his eyes peeled on the entire Strip (it was less than half a mile long) from the parking lot of the Donut Dive across from the old Wigwam Motel, but everything was quiet.  All he saw were some truckers coming and going from the porn shops with chagrined looks on their faces.  He managed to learn nothing else but did eat three Eternal Fassnachts and downed a large Amish Mocha.

Around 6:00, he went back to his second-floor office in the Alleger Buildings - a small row of shops and offices in turn-of-the-century houses with gabled roofs across the Trail from the Inn.  His kidneys felt like lead.  He went to the john and then found some leftover Lenape take-away in the icebox he'd gotten from the joint downstairs.  Just as he sat in his chair to get stuck in to his congealed vittles, someone knocked at the door. It was Elwood Schleinkoffer, the bartender from the Taproom. Elwood was a tall, white-haired man with a big nose and big, thick-framed glasses from the sixties. 

He came in and said, Hey, Dick, I heard what you and Hattie was talkin' about.  I heard her say something about a tall, good-lookin' broad. I also saw you slip her a Hamilton. I wasn't gonna say nuttin' in the Taproom with her sittin' there 'cause her mouth moves like a clapper on a duck's ass, but I saw that chick too.  For one Hamilton and one Lincoln, I'll tell ya' what I know.

Sam wasn't happy to have to shell out more dead presidents, but apparently some of the villagers knew more than they told the state police.  That wasn't really surprising. Having been forsaken by the governments of the townships, the villagers weren't terribly fond of the authorities at all.  He tossed the folding money across his desk. Elwood took it and shoved it in one of the shirt pockets under his vest.

She come into the Taproom and ordered one of them fancy city drinks, a Cosmo I think. I didn't know what the fuck that was, so I poured her some white wine and pretended I didn't speak English.

Of course, he would have been able to convince her pretty easily. Sam was an outsider, an Ausslander from Upstate New York; his one and only in-county relative was his Aunt Rose who married an army colonel stationed at the local base and had relocated to Tobyhanna, up on the mountain as the locals called the northern plateau region of the county.  As such, Sam was raised speaking English, but Bartonsville was on the border of Pennsylvania German land, and most older people in the village, Elwood and Hattie among them, spoke Deits, Pennsylvania German, as well as English.

That's too bad; you didn't talk to her then. You might have learned something else, Sam replied.

Ah, what the hell do I care, one Ausslander is the same as another.  They're all like you damn New Yorkers with your highfalutin' talk. That Upstate New York was a different universe when compared to New York City made no difference to the likes of Elwood.

But I will tell you one more thing that struck me funny, he continued. She smelled a little like ammonia.  Imagine a fancy broad like that smellin' of ammonia. With that Elwood reached over the desk and swiped one of Sam's special Lenape cornbread pancakes with the fortune inside saying as he left, You don't need it anyway; you're too fat.

Sam mused over this new information as the old man's spindly legs clambered down the wooden stairway leading to the back door of his building.  Keeping all possible suspects in the village in mind, he knew that tomorrow he would have to pay Molly Kresge a visit.  Since she was Greunzwig's maid, she might have seen this fancy lady.

THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNNY as Sam awoke from a fitful slumber. He had a twenty dollar headache from drinking some five dollar Skunks' Misery Bourbon the night before instead of his usual Reeders Run Rye. He pried himself off the sofa in his office, walked down the hall to the washroom and made himself presentable. He went downstairs and outside to meet the day and decided the sun was too bright especially since it made his 1969 Buick Skylark look old and dingy, which of course it was. He got in the car and cranked the starter until its ancient eight cylinders finally half coughed and then purred like an aging lion.  He was off to see Molly.

It was Wednesday, so she would be at the Pokona House out on Beehler Road near the unofficial border between Bartonsville and Lower Tannersville. Molly was Bartonsville's most reputable housekeeper.  She normally only worked in private homes, but on Wednesdays she worked for her elderly mother, Margaret Kresge, at the Pokona House, a small B&B in an old farm house with a collection of tiny cabins as was common for one-star accommodation in Pocono Mountains. As he rounded the curve just before arriving at the homestead, he saw the flashing lights of an ambulance parked in the driveway.  He pulled the Skylark to one side of the road and rushed to the scene almost tripping and falling into one of the old woman's copious patches of lavender plants growing along the walk.

EMTs from the Pocono Township Ambulance Service were taking Molly's poor mother away on a stretcher, her face covered.  Sam knew it was her from the emerald ring on her gnarly old hand sticking out from under the sheet.  Molly was on a swing on the front porch with an EMT giving her smelling salts.  Molly was a tall, young woman, plain to look at, but as Sam approached he wondered what she would look like with some make-up and perhaps a wig. Could it have been Molly that Hattie saw leaving Greunzwig's house? Elwood said that the mysterious lady smelled of ammonia, a common cleaning product. On the other hand, Elwood had gotten a good look at her, and wig or no, he would have recognized her; they were second cousins. Sam stood on the porch a few feet away from Molly to see if she would come to.

After a few minutes, she did and upon seeing him declared, Oh, Sam Saint Cloud, thank God you're here.  My poor mother, they killed her, they killed her!  I just know they did!

According to Molly, her mother was going about collecting linens to do the washing. She went to the laundry room in the basement when Molly heard her scream. She rushed downstairs and saw three copperhead snakes sitting in the laundry basket atop the dirty sheets. Her mother was holding on to her arm and beginning to faint when Molly arrived.  Within moments she collapsed with no sign of a snake bite. Molly figured the sight of the snakes must have triggered a heart attack, and this scared her to death. After revealing that much of her story, the EMT took Molly upstairs and told her to call someone who cold stay with her.

Sam left the Pokona more confused than before, and Molly was in no state to answer questions about the recent murder of Greunzwig; moreover this sad event put her squarely back into the limelight.  What if Elwood had been covering for her? Maybe it had been Molly who killed Greunzwig to cover up their affair.  Maybe Margaret Kresge found something out, and she had to be eliminated as well.  Sam rubbed his forehead. Normally cases in Bartonsville were a lot simpler than this; in twelve years there had been hardly any murders at all.  Now it looked like there might be a second one in a single week.

Sam hauled himself back into the Skylark managing as usual to pull up the brown synthetic fiber seat-cover. He swore under his breath and headed back down to the Taproom. When he got there, Elwood was reading the Bartonsville Blotter and drinking a cup of Mountain Home Roast. He looked up for a split second as Sam plunked his hulk down on a barstool.

The inn's restaurant's open for breakfast.  What the fuck are you doin' here botherin' me now? Elwood asked unapologetically.

I need as full a description of this mysterious Ausslanderin as you can give me, Sam ordered keeping a leery eye on Elwood in case his countenance revealed any deception.

Elwood rolled his eyes and sighed. He said, I can do ya one better, Dick, Elwood clicked the TV on over the bar and hit a switch underneath the counter. He grabbed a remote, and suddenly surveillance video from the night in question came up on the screen.

Y'know, all this got me to thinkin', so I come back here and I looked in the video cassettes. You know Elwood Jr. made me this system after those cops from the Scranton PBA came in for their annual ball and busted up the place about ten years ago. So anyways, I looked through the tapes last night after I left your place, and I seen this. Elwood stopped on a black-and-white image of the bar. As luck would have it, the mysterious woman's face was very near the camera, and the image was remarkably clear. One thing that was certain was that she was not Molly Kresge. This woman's face was much narrower, her lips thinner, and her cheekbones