by Kris Lackey
“We don’t know. We’re gathering information.”
“And the girl?”
“She was murdered in Pontotoc County several days ago.”
“Ugh. Wild beasts roaming the land, and you can’t tell one from the milkman.”
Maytubby nodded for the two seconds it took his synapses to patch the call to “milkman.” “Yes, ma’am. Thanks again.”
Coming down the steps, he saw the OSBI plain wrapper parking a block down Blackwelder. He turned away from it. In his cruiser, he e-mailed Scrooby the latter half of their conversation in the Classen Grill, along with what he had learned from the birdwatcher. And that Trepanier had left before the unmarked car arrived. He rolled down his windows and listened. No cycles in the immediate vicinity.
On the road back to Ada, Maytubby stopped in downtown Norman and got coffee at the Gray Owl. Vintage bicycles hung from the ceiling, and small expressionist acrylics were mounted on the painted brick walls. The coffee of the day, noted in pink chalk on a blackboard, was La Golondrina—the swallow, as in bird. Okay pun. Pastries glowed in the vitrine. He added a date bar to his coffee and paid. Ceiling fans moved the cool air. The young faces bent over laptops were half lit by retro lamps. A few people were bent over Bibles; he could tell by the leather-grain binding. There was a token hipster presence—some tattoos and funny hats.
Maytubby looked from face to face, taking in the smooth skin and bright scanning eyes. The large, live room was quiet save for “Rocky Raccoon” playing softly in the rafters, and the occasional hiss of a steam wand.
In the Canadian bottom, fields of desiccated soybeans and corn rolled past his window like a russet carpet. Here and there an alfalfa patch, irrigated by a well, blazed green as Oz. Maytubby drank his coffee too quickly. To avoid seeing the fire damage, he drove farther south than he had to. He knew that the blaze had been stopped in the Canadian floodplain, which meant it was too small to trigger disaster relief. Lots of uninsured citizens in there. A Ninja passed him going the opposite direction. It was white.
“Agent Maytubby!” He flinched and realized he was on the edge of sleep.
“Yeah, Les.”
“Your nation needs you.”
“You been talking to Scrooby?”
“Doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I almost called you on your cell.”
“Then you know that I had a productive stakeout.”
“It’s the state’s case now, Bill. Let them and Johnston County handle it. I’ve got a subpoena needs to go to Tish yesterday.”
“I’m about twenty miles out.” Maytubby had the next two days off, but he did not remind his boss of this fact.
He stopped at a convenience store in Stratford and bought a large coffee. The woman who had kicked Donnie Frederick to the curb was in the checkout line. She gave him the stink-eye. He could try to thank her for her tip about the primered pickup, but she would just assume he was lying again. He pretended not to recognize her.
Chapter 28
Jill Milton stepped into her apartment, pulled her keys from the doorknob, and swore under her breath. “You scared the dickens out of me, Bill! Where’s your cruiser?”
Maytubby propped himself up on his elbow. He had fallen asleep on her couch. “I parked it in back to outwit the guerrilla.”
“I thought a male stripper had broken into my apartment.”
“Comanches go for the veggie parable?”
“That was yesterday.”
“I was just thinking those were some spirit-of-the-law panty hose.”
“Nude. I had to do nutrition PSAs for KCNP this afternoon.”
“Why does ‘nude’ sound like not the right thing to wear to do that?”
“I think the rule’s logic is that if you don’t wear panty hose, your legs are naked.”
She reached under her skirt and snapped the hose off, balancing effortlessly on one leg and then the other to peel them off her feet. She made a nylon potato and threw it over the couch, into the front closet.
“Put it that way, I see what you mean. Woo-woo.” He rose and walked toward her.
She put her hand out to stop him. “I have to shower. Spent most of the morning unloading produce and stacking zucchini and oranges in the FDP grocery store. Loading dock was hot as a skillet.”
“You unloaded a produce truck while wearing a suit and panty hose?”
“Think about it. The alternative would be what, chinos and panty hose?”
“Okay, so back one more. Why were you working in the distribution store?”
“I was finished training a teacher in the demo kitchen, and a stocker called in sick. Not sick—bitten by a copperhead. Judy Cole.”
He shook his head to show he didn’t know her. “Where?”
Jill looked at him and smiled. “You are a man. So ‘in the blackberry patch by her house on Kullihoma Road.’”
“That’s sexist. I wanted to know where on her body.”
“Huh.”
“Huh. So where on her body?”
“Pinky toe.”
“Did you wear one of those black support belts?”
“You have to shower, too.” She dropped the venetian blinds on the west-facing window.
“You’ll wash off all my pheromones and then yew won’t wawnt me.”
“You’ve been listening to country on that stakeout.”
“So how is she? The stocker.” Maytubby folded his uniform shirt and laid it over his duty belt on the coffee table.
“She’s better. Told the manager her foot looks like a sack of dog food.”
He turned the cold knob in the little acrylic shower. “You want any hot in this?”
“No.”
She grabbed a floral shower cap off a nail and pulled it over her hair. He fondled it with both hands. “Mmm-m. Victoria’s Secret?”
She slapped his bum and shoved him under the nozzle. He pulled her in against him, and they kissed in the cool rain. French soap was one of Jill’s indulgences. They lathered each other with Roger & Gallet Carnation. When the little round soap puck slipped out of her hand, Maytubby had to step out of the shower so he could bend enough to retrieve it. While he was stooped, she put her foot on his shoulder. He snatched it and bit her ankle.
She somehow managed to turn the water off before, soapy and wet, they tumbled out onto Jill’s Guatemalan runner. She pinched the cap off her hair, and they made love under the faint chill settling from her window unit.
It was dark when they woke. A pale yellow light from the streetlamp on King’s Road backlit the blinds. “This wool is scratchy,” Jill said.
“‘Hardwood’ means what it says.”
Maytubby had a shelf in Jill’s closet where he kept a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a razor, and a paperback novel. The novel in there now was Stegner’s Angle of Repose. He put on fresh jeans and a black twill short-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar. Jill pulled an almond knit blouse over her head and tugged up some olive Capris.
“Sustenance,” she said. She opened the refrigerator and handed Maytubby a pear, a bag of arugula, a little package of walnuts, and a bottle of creole mustard. Then she hefted a large Pyrex casserole out onto the counter and opened the lid to show him marinated tofu strips.
“Looks like you’ve been to DK Nutrition. Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and?”
“Soy sauce. You know the salad, right? Pears not too thin?”
“If they are, you going to curse and thrash me like last time?”
“Worse.”
Long before Jill moved into the garage apartment, the pilot on the tiny old three-burner stove had died. A green spoon holder on the back of the range held a small stack of used Blue Diamond matches. She struck a fresh one and lit a burner, then blew out the match in Maytubby’s direction.
“Devil woman!”
He halved th
e Bosc pear, cut a slice, and held it up to her.
“It’ll do,” she said.
He slid some walnuts into the toaster oven and whisked together olive oil, white wine vinegar, creole mustard, and salt. Jill slid the tofu slabs into a large skillet and leaned against Maytubby while he beat the dressing. “I don’t know why people want big kitchens,” she said.
When the tofu had crusted, she flipped it, spun her laptop on the kitchen table, and clicked on Pandora’s Smooth Jazz. Maytubby set out plates and cutlery and poured ice water in red plastic tumblers. With one of the wooden matches, he lit a fat red candle. While Jill was serving the tofu, he drizzled the greens and pear slices with his dressing and topped the salad with walnuts.
He set the bowl on the table and looked over everything. “Where’s the ketchup?”
“Sit down.”
They clunked tumblers, and for a good while the only sounds in the room were the rattle of forks and the throaty moan of Chet Baker’s trumpet.
“Trepanier and Stoddard are in cahoots,” Maytubby said.
“You caught them cahooting?”
“Five a.m. yesterday, Dr. Dave Woodley paid a visit to the scourge of Paoli.”
“Dr. Dave?”
“Christian Soldiers Seminary.”
“Motto ‘Onward!’”
“Doctorate in scatology.”
Jill honked and turned red. “You’re shitting me.”
“Told me so himself.”
“If he’s in cahoots with Stoddard, he’s got the right degree for it.”
“Said Stoddard had asked him over to begin the day with prayer.”
“What did the trophy wife think of … Wait. She wasn’t home.”
Maytubby touched his nose.
“Do you think they’re hooking up?”
“Not so much anymore, though it’s not out of the question. I found a motel clerk who saw Stoddard and Majesty Tate together more than once. And a neighbor across the street from Dr. Dave said Majesty Tate stayed at his apartment in the late spring and early summer. Said he was gone a week at a time.”
“The OSBI agent …”
“Scrooby.”
“You convince him?”
“He didn’t like it.”
“Why doesn’t he bring the Bastille guy in?”
Maytubby smoothed his hair. “He put a tail on him. But Trepanier took off after I talked to him. Before the unmarked car arrived.”
“He’s like a free radical, floating around somewhere, causing mischief.”
“It may have caught up with him. He’s got too many dead bolts on his front door. I also learned from an Arkansas State Police officer that whoever killed Majesty Tate killed a Realtor involved in a business dispute. The killer evidently set up a fall guy.”
“Like Austin Love.”
“Yes. And the fall guy was later strangled by someone on a motorcycle.”
“The killer isn’t a very good tactician.”
Maytubby stabbed walnuts with his fork. “Forensics is thwarting a whole generation of cunning rogues.”
“You still don’t have DNA for the strangler or the person who tried to kill you, so …”
“Yeah, we could have two or three different people, and one of them could be Trepanier.”
“Or Stoddard,” she snorted. “Can you picture him on a dirt bike?”
“Not willingly.”
“You need your Mountie hat when you talk like that.”
“I’m secure in my imperialist identity.”
Jill frowned at her salad. “I have this bad feeling you’re going to drive around all night looking for trouble.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Does that mean we can read to each other and then spoon?”
“I think so.”
He washed the dishes, and she dried them and put them in the tiny cupboard. “How long has it been since we did True Grit?” she said.
“At least six months. Took me a month of that to stop talking like Mattie Ross.”
“Keep your seat, Trash.”
“Exactly.”
Jill took a well-handled copy of the novel from a shelf by her sofa and sat with her back against one arm. She put on her round black nerd readers, which she used when she had taken out her contacts. By custom, Maytubby faced her with his back against the other arm. They played a little footsie. She cleared her throat loudly and inhaled to begin reading.
Before she could, they both heard the climbing whine of a motorcycle. She laid the book in her lap, and they both looked at the floor, concentrating on the sound. It wound down South Broadway toward and then past them, on to Kerr Lab Road, fading out to the southwest.
The voice Jill Milton had invented for Mattie Ross their first time through the book was schoolmarm imperious. Maytubby laughed as she cocked her head back and delivered Mattie’s backstory. Tom Chaney, the man who murdered Mattie Ross’ father, “rode his gray horse that was better suited to pulling a middlebuster than carrying a rider. He had no handgun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you.”
Two hours later, Mattie was chasing Tom Chaney through Indian Territory and Jill was still reading. Maytubby was happy she hadn’t handed the book back to him. She liked Mattie.
Just after ten, she closed the book and tossed it to the center of the couch. He wanted her to read the whole story and felt a little cheated by bedtime. She went into the bedroom. Maytubby checked his e-mail and phone messages, then plugged in both devices to charge. When he turned off the living room lamp, the charging and status lights of their devices on the kitchen table pulsed in a comforting way. They seemed to reassure him that everyone would stay close to him and that the simulacrum world of cyberspace would awake at his touch tomorrow and shelter him and his from life. If everyone kept their head buried in that world, the buzzards gyring high in the real sky would remain invisible.
Jill lay on her side on top of the sheets, the red T-shirt nightgown sliding off her shoulder. Maytubby carried his pistol into the bedroom and set it on the night table. As he was unbuttoning his shirt, Jill frowned at the gun. “It’s the first time.”
“Your house. Want me to put it back?”
“No. I know you don’t want it there. You don’t even like guns.”
He took her in his arms and breathed the scent of her skin—cumin and green tea. He whispered in her ear, “Make sure I’m awake before I start shooting.”
“Will do.”
The window unit labored.
* * *
At 3:20 by the digital clock radio, Maytubby woke but lay still. Headlights swept the apartment ceiling, first one way, then another, switching directions too quickly for a car. So a headlight. The window unit almost masked a guttural thrum that finally registered.
He rolled out of bed slowly and walked to the blinds, lifted a slat. The bike was on King’s Road, barely visible in the dark space between the illuminated cones of two streetlights. It was going in slow circles, round and round, like a Shriner’s bike, but not a cruiser. Many of the houses on King’s Road bore no numbers, Jill’s garage apartment among them. The apartment was also set back from the big house—a hard place to find in daylight. The headlight went out, and the engine fell silent. A few seconds later, a narrow, intense flashlight beam from a few feet outside the big-house gate darted randomly across the lawn and the facade of the house. Jill’s car wasn’t in the garage. The flashlight beam paused on the rear of the old champagne Accord.
Maytubby didn’t like that, though he couldn’t immediately see what anyone but a cop could do with what was illuminated. He shucked on his civilian pants. Jill breathed thickly, her face to the wall. He took his pistol off the night table and grabbed his cell. Kneeling behind the couch, he opened the cell, dialed the Ada Police. T
he dispatcher, whose voice he didn’t recognize, listened to his short backstory and his request for two cruisers, no lights or sirens, to block King’s Road at Stockton and at Broadway.
He snapped the phone shut. As he was walking back to the window, he picked up Jill’s reading glasses and slipped them on. He knew they had a low diopter and wouldn’t blur the world. The ice-blue shard of light still played over the house, from the same spot. The person had not moved. Down in the bottom, a rooster crowed. He gave the cops almost enough time to arrive before he stuck the pistol in the back of his pants and stepped out onto the little wooden landing at the top of the stairs.
At first, the biker could not locate the sound of the long spring screeching on the old screen door. The ice-blue pencil zigzagged a few times before it found Maytubby, who, standing in his civvies, feet bare and nerd glasses in place, said in his best hick voice, “Hey, there! You’re up with the chickens! What can I do you for?”
The blue light was intense, but Maytubby could see in his peripheral vision the prowlers arriving just seconds apart. The biker stood completely still and said nothing. Some coyotes yelped in the woods across the bypass. Maytubby pressed his palm against his jeans to keep it dry.
A minute or so passed. “Hel-lo-o?” Maytubby said. Nothing.
He couldn’t tell exactly when the biker turned his eyes back to the street and saw one of the cruisers, but the flashlight went out, and the grate of heavy boots slewing on gravel brought Maytubby down the stairs. Even in big work boots, the biker was remarkably swift, and he had a twenty-yard head start toward the road. The Ada cops couldn’t see them yet.
Closer to the road, there was enough street light to show Maytubby a green Ninja. Its rider leaped into the seat, and strobes from the Ada cruisers lit up the whole block. Maytubby couldn’t shoot, because of the houses. He heard the full-throated scream of the bike’s engine as he left his feet. Though the biker had not turned his helmet in Maytubby’s direction, he instinctively flattened himself on the bike and even lowered his head below the gas tank, like an old pony trick rider. Missing the biker’s torso, Maytubby caught a pinch of shirt as he tucked for the ground. He held on as some loose gravel on the asphalt ricocheted off his head.