“Some,” I said. I wasn’t going to ask why she asked that question because I already knew.
I trotted to the kitchen, Veenie in tow. I fished into the cookie jar as we went out by the back kitchen door. I pulled out a twenty and a couple of crumpled ones. Not much, but more than we’d had in there for a couple of months. Dode’s ghost problem had plumped up our Twinkie fund.
Veenie plucked the bills out of my hand. “Could use me a cheesy mystery meat sub. Some fat onion rings. Make the trip downtown worth the effort.” She smoothed the bills and tucked them neatly into her bra.
Pokey’s Tavern and Pool Hall is in an old brick building built in 1896. It was the only business in Knobby Waters, other than the First National Bank, that had never gone bankrupt or been closed. My daddy used to say if you had to invest in something, invest in good liquor, because no matter how bad times got, men would always find the money for a cold one. People bought liquor in good times to celebrate their lives and in bad times to commiserate. Five generations of Knobby Waters patrons had worn the wooden barstools to a shine inside Pokey’s.
When we strutted into Pokey’s, it was after one in the morning. The crowd was thin. Not like it was ever that thick, mind you, except for March Madness during the basketball playoffs. That time of year men tumbled like dung beetles over each other trying to get into the bar. Fistfights broke out over a prime barstool to sit and watch the action on the big screen that hung on rusty old tractor tire chains from the rafters.
The air inside Pokey’s was thick with smoke and the smell of fried onions. The glow of neon from the tavern sign and the beer ads lit up the place in red-and-green streaks. The juke box was on, and Kenny Rogers was wailing. The sound of pool balls cracking together ricocheted through the smoke.
Harry, the boss, and Kandy the medium, were holed up in a corner booth making out. Harry’s hat was on the table. A row of dirty highball glasses lined the lip of the booth. A mess of dirty dishes, a half-eaten red plastic basket of onion rings, and a greasy trail of used paper napkins spilled across the tabletop.
Veenie made a disgusting sucking sound as we walked up to Harry’s booth.
Kandy popped up for air. “Howdy, gals.” She looked like a heartbroken raccoon. Her eyeliner was running. She finger-fluffed her red hair, which was mashed down on one side from working her way up Harry’s skinny neck like a human Hoover.
Harry waved a bottle of Schlitz at us. His tie was loose. His jacket and vest were off, and his shirt was unbuttoned down to his sternum. He was one of those guys who had a freckled, smooth chest.
Veenie eyed Kandy. “We got the séance all set up with Dode for tomorrow night. Me and RJ will pick you up at the Moon Glo, long about seven.”
Kandy pulled a cigarette out from a silver case in her tiny purse. “You gals got cash money?”
“Sure.”
“Can I see it?” She held her hand out, palm up. She rubbed her fingers together.
“Nope,” said Veenie.
“Why not?”
“It’s in the bank. Harry will write you a check once we get the ghost talking. This here is a business transaction. We pay on satisfactory completion of service.”
Harry raised his beer. “I’m good for it, baby.”
Fergie Junior was fooling around up on the music stage. He was breaking down the microphone and speakers. A guy next to Junior was sliding his guitar into a battered case that was plastered with seventies band stickers.
“Yo! Ma!” Junior waved. “Thanks for the ride.”
“What in the name of Sam Hill happened to your hog?” asked Veenie.
Junior shrugged. “I parked in the alley next to the dumpster. It’s gone now.” He shuffled around disconnecting the mics.
“You sure about that? ’Cause last time you called us for a ride that Harley was parked over at the bank, right where you left it.”
“I’m sure. Don’t I look sober to you?” He stepped up and whipped off his green John Lennon glasses. His blue eyes were a little bloodshot, but the pupils were normal, not fly specks or full dark moons. Even his reddish moustache looked straight and sober, neatly trimmed on the ends for a change.
The man who’d been packing up his guitar behind Junior stepped forward and offered his hand to Veenie. I’d seen him sneaking in and out of Junior’s basement hidey-hole twice during the last week. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I’m Darnell. Darnell Zikes, from down around Washington County.”
Darnell was short and pudgy with one lazy brown eye. He wore plaid white and blue pedal pushers and a wife beater T-shirt that read, “Save a horse. Ride a redneck.” His feet were stuffed into Dr. Scholl’s slide sandals. White athletic tube socks puddled around his thick ankles. His face looked like someone had mashed gravel into his cheeks. His gray hair, held back by a yellow paisley bandana, was stringy and tangled like a well-used mop head. Tiny Willy Nelson style pigtails framed the side of his face.
Veenie eyed Darnell. “Aren’t you a little old for rock-and-roll?”
Darnell puckered up. He toked on a lit doobie he snagged from a nearby ashtray. His eyes squinted against the smoke. “I dunno, let me consult with Mick Jagger. Get back to you on that, Granny.” He coughed out a laugh.
“He’s the same age as me, Ma,” said Junior as he slipped into a sleeveless jean jacket. A puff of reddish gray hair, like a mouse, stuck up in the V of his “High Powered,” black T-shirt.
“Like I said,” grumbled Veenie.
Junior shuffled his feet. “It ok if Darnell crashes with us a few days? He’s passing though. Filling in for Eddie.”
“What the heck is wrong with Eddie?” I was tempted to add now, because my grown son always moped around. He was pushing fifty. Like Junior, he’d somehow got the notion in his head that life was supposed to be a heap of fun. He wrote poetry and cried an awful lot for a grown guy. I’d never known what to do for him, God bless his little achy-breaky heart.
“Er, nothing wrong, not really,” said Junior. “I mean, he’s just feeling poorly. His gal dumped him.”
“Didn’t know he had a gal,” I said.
“Well, he don’t now.”
Veenie was sitting on a stool at the bar chatting up the owner of Pokey’s Tavern, Pokey Tatlock. She was putting in her take-out order for a mystery meat sub and some fat, hot, greasy onion rings.
Pokey had huge blue anchors tattooed on each bicep, like Popeye. Busty mermaids swung on the anchors. He was as tall and broad shouldered as a football player. He was the type of guy who loved many, but married none. At least thirteen kids in Pawpaw County had his chin dimple, but not a single woman ever wore his wedding ring. His hair was jet black and he kept it greased back like a sixties heart throb. A spit curl fell over his forehead in a Clark Gable, devilish sort of way. He was growing white at the temples, but that didn’t seem to affect his popularity with the women.
I went over to see what Veenie was up to while I waited for Junior and Darnell to pack up the band. They got free food, a sort of all-you-can-stomach buffet deal, in exchange for playing at Pokey’s. They were snorting up the leftovers on the hot bar. Darnell was busy spearing onion rings on his pudgy fingers, shoveling them down his pie hole. Between bites, Darnell was squirting ketchup into his mouth. Junior took to imitating him. I hoped to God they didn’t upchuck in the Impala on the way home.
“Ruby Jane,” said Pokey. He grabbed my hand in a hearty two-handed shake. “Looking good, gal.”
“You too, Pokey. What’s the news?”
“Got nothing on you two. Saw that piece in the Squealer. Ghost busting, man, you gals really know how to party.”
“It’s Veenie,” I said. “Trouble follows her around like a piglet waddling after its mama.”
Veenie grinned. “It’s my special talent.”
“Say,” said Pokey. “I got me a mystery. Maybe you two gals could help me solve it.”
“Lay it on us.”
“Someone’s been breaking into my back pantry. Eating my profits. I
can show you, if you got a minute.” He hitched his thumb toward the back pantry. “Dinner’s on me, if you’ll have a look.”
Pokey popped up the hinged part of the bar, and we scooted under and followed him past the potato chip racks and candy bar displays toward the kitchen. We went through the kitchen where his mom, Dolly, was shaking the onion ring fryers and using a spatula to beat on some mystery meat. She was a tiny woman, older than us. She was wearing a Marilyn Monroe blonde wig and smoking a Virginia Slims cigarette. She was wearing cat-eye glasses that were greased over with fryer spittle. Her earrings dangled like fishing lures from her earlobes. She had to stand on a step stool to reach the grill. Dolly tossed us a wave, but kept right on working the grill and fryer with both hands as we slid by.
“Your mama’s looking mighty good,” I said to Pokey.
“I keep telling her she don’t need to work no more. Me and the boys can support her, but she loves work. Always thinking up new surprise dishes. Last week she made an apple, Snickers bar and baby marshmallows salad with an Oreo crumble crust. Boy, that stuff flew out of the refrigerator.”
“Sorry I missed that,” said Veenie. “Sounds healthy. Got all your basic food groups. Nothing healthier than apples and nuts. And chocolate, that’s a health food now too.”
We were standing in the pantry. The back door opened out into the alley. A little side window was cracked open, letting in air. Outside the window the alley was lined with gray dumpsters. Several businesses, including the Hoosier Feedbag Grocery and the sheriff’s office, shared those dumpsters with the tavern.
The pantry was narrow and tall. One side was lined with shelves covered in tacked-down oilcloth. Pokey stored trays of buns, big white buckets of potatoes, and institutional-sized bags of sugar and flour on the shelves. A see-in, sliding door refrigerator held tomatoes, lettuce, slaw, mayonnaise, giant yellow cheese food loafs, and a couple of gallons of iced tea with lemon wedges floating in them like little yellow canoes. A white lowboy freezer held, I was guessing, meat patties and bags of onion rings and other fried food delicacies. Several dented, untapped kegs of beer were rolled tight to the wall.
Veenie eyed it all. “What’s the problem?”
“This here is the problem,” said Pokey. He shoved aside some giant plastic bottles of ketchup.
We stared at a bag of hot dog buns that had been ripped open. Bun pieces were tossed everywhere. A super-sized bag of BBQ chips had been ripped wide open. The shelf was dusted in red BBQ powder.
Pokey shook his head. “Mama cleaned up most of the mess. It’s like this every morning. Some mornings worse. Been going on all week. Plus,” he walked over to the lowboy freezer and popped open the lid. Cold steam rolled out. “We’re missing several bags of mystery meat.”
Veenie had to stand on tiptoe to see in the freezer. Her glasses frosted over. She took them off and wiped them on her shirttail. “Varmints?”
“Nah,” said Pokey as he slammed shut the freezer lid. “Varmints couldn’t open the freezer and take out the meat.”
I looked around the freezer, then behind it. “They take the bags whole? No sign they are dragging them out and eating them here?”
Pokey shook his head.
Veenie pointed to some tiny footprints in the BBQ powder on the shelf and some nibbled holes in the buns’ plastic bags. “Looks mousy to me.”
“Sure,” confirmed Pokey. “I mean, we got mice. Who don’t? But that don’t explain the missing meat. It’d take an army of mice to spring that freezer and shoulder out those bags. Those bags are clean gone. Where’d they go?”
I eyed the little window at the far end of the pantry. It was open an inch or so. Too small for a grown person to climb through. “You leave that window open at night?”
“Sure, during the day we blow it wide open. Open the door into the kitchen too so Mama can get a breeze going. Don’t want her fainting, going face down into a fryer.”
I eyed the distance between the window and door. “It’s a small window. Wouldn’t stop the dumpster raccoons, though. They could reach right in. Twist open the doorknob.”
Veenie nodded. “She’s right. Raccoons have them creepy little hands. They can open refrigerators. Open jars. We had a pack once that got in at the VFW. Opened all the jars of peanut butter. Came in one morning, found a pair of them sitting on the kitchen table with five-gallon peanut butter jars stuck on their heads.”
Pokey crossed his arms, and his tattooed mermaids wiggled. “How do you explain this? Can a raccoon do this?”
He walked over to the metal keg nearest the door. There was a puddle of yellow beer on the floor.
I saw instantly what he meant. The keg had been tapped. Someone had taken off the cardboard protective cover and screwed down a tap system and pumped up some beer. The floor was puddled with overflow.
Veenie inspected the tap. “Somebody sure knew what he was doing.”
“Yeah,” said Pokey. “It’s a neat tap.”
“Also, Veenie eyed the other kegs, “they got taste. They tapped the PBR. That’s the good stuff.”
Pokey wiped his hands on his apron. He shut the door to the pantry as he led us out. “You gals think you can solve this here mystery?”
“Sure,” said Veenie as Dolly handed us a white paper bag with the top neatly rolled down. It contained our to-go order. The onion rings were already staining the bag with giant spots of grease. “Let us think on it for a spell.”
“You got it,” said Pokey. “And hey,” he said, as he swatted Veenie on the ass, “don’t be strangers. I owe you gals, and Big Pokey always pays his bills.”
Chapter Twelve
Junior’s new friend, Darnell Zikes, crooned all the way home. Something about bow-legged women and broken cowboy hearts. The boys were crowded in the back of the Impala with their drums and guitar cases. When I squinted in the rearview, Darnell looked like some homely girl Junior had picked up. I reckoned it was the Willy Nelson pigtails.
Darnell leaned up and rested his chin on the front seat between Veenie and me. He put me in the mind of a gray, floppy-eared dog. He started pestering Veenie about our ghost busting case. “You seen ghosts?” he asked. “For real? Real dang ghosts? I mean, how do you know they was ghosts, and not like moonbeams or clouds or some such shit?”
Darnell seemed like a nice enough fellow, but his stray brown eye made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. I kept an eye on him in the rearview as we chugged home. Fergie Junior wasn’t the best judge of character. He had a good heart, but left unsupervised, he often showed a real affinity for redneck riffraff. He once brought home a sweet old hobo he met at a Grateful Dead concert at the State Fair up in Indianapolis. Turned out the guy was wanted on three charges of cannibalism down in Kentucky. I wasn’t happy about the wacky weed he and Darnell were toking in the back seat, but at least it kept them mellow.
Veenie chattered on about our ghost case between bites of her cheesy mystery meat sandwich. “We found the skeleton. That’s as good as a ghost. We reckon the ghost belongs to the skeleton.” She wiped her chin with a paper napkin. “Want an onion ring, RJ?” she asked.
“Sure.” Though I knew I’d regret it as soon as I lay down in bed later.
Veenie squirted two packages of ketchup on a giant ring. She held it out to the side of my mouth like she was offering it to a dog. She knew I wasn’t about to take my hands off the wheel. I gnawed off the crunchy burnt crust. I sucked in the slippery onion as I cautiously rolled through the four-way stop in the center of town.
Veenie continued explaining the case to Darnell. “Coroner says the skeleton was murdered. Poison. Arsenic.”
“No shit?” said Darnell. “For real?” He exhaled a cloud of smoke that rivaled what had been coming from under the hood of the Chevy lately. He handed the doobie to Junior. “Who was she? Who murdered her?”
“Don’t know. We’re thinking she was Jedidiah Wyatt’s wife, Alta Iona. Maybe old Jedidiah offed her.”
“I thought he up and left
town. That’s what that Internet guy wrote.”
“Nobody knows. That’s why we’re having a séance. We need to talk to Alta Iona ourselves.”
“You find anything else out at that mansion?”
“Like?”
“I dunno. Like anything cool. Flying saucers? Mummies? Cool stuff?”
“Nah,” said Veenie. “But we didn’t really get to poke around. Once the coroner came, the fuzz roped it off as a crime scene.”
Too late, I saw the sheriff’s car hiding behind a dump truck in the parking lot at the Guthrie Mill. He’d been hiding waiting for speeders or late-night drunks. The red light whirled on. A siren chirped. The cop car pulled out after us.
Darnell panicked. “What the fuck! Hey, the cops are after us. Hit the gas, Granny!”
Veenie sucked down the last of her mystery meat sandwich and licked her fingers. “You’re paranoid,” she said. “It’s the wacky weed. Hang loose. And keep your yapper zipped.”
I pulled the Impala onto the gravel shoulder and glanced in the back seat. “For Pete’s sake, try and look innocent,” I said to the boys. Junior nodded and sat up straight. Too straight. He looked like a corpse wearing John Lennon glasses. He folded his hands in his lap. He tried to whistle, but his lips were too dry. They fluttered like paper.
Darnell’s one stray eye looked guilty. No matter how hard he tried, that eye bounced around the back seat like a brown Super Ball on speed.
Great. All Veenie and I needed was to get busted for possession.
I watched as Boots unfolded out of the sheriff’s car. He moseyed up to the Impala. He pulled his long leather ticket book out of his back pocket. “Evening, gals,” he said. “What you doing out so late?”
I reluctantly cranked down my window.
Veenie leaned over me and waved at Boots. “Hi, Bootsie. Snack run. Down at Pokey’s.”
Boots eyed me. “You gals been drinking?”
“Course not.”
He leaned in closer and sniffed the car. “Smoking?”
“For Pete’s sake, Boots,” I crowed. “I’m pushing seventy. The only drugs we do come with a prescription.”
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