by Anna Castle
“You’re very diligent,” Carson said. “I have to admire your work ethic.”
“I’m motivated.” I flashed Ty a tropical smile.
“You’ve done a good job already.” Ty smiled encouragement, but worry shadowed his eyes. “You’re a better investigator than any of our deputies.”
“Yeah,” Hank growled. “She’s a regular Girlock Holmes.”
The rest of us gaped at him in astonishment.
“What?” His lip curled, pleased with the result. “Y’all think I don’t got cable?”
Chapter 24
As I walked out of the building, an argument against Hank’s stupidity defense struck me like a blast of hot air. No, wait—that was just heat rising off the sidewalk. But the argument worked. Hank could have hidden that car near his lair to keep an eye on it until things cooled down, planning to sell it in San Antonio, like he’d said, along with the ten thousand dollar boots. Why waste such valuable commodities?
It was still stupid. Possibly stupider. A case of delayed stupidity, which perhaps displayed some degree of maturity, but still did not invalidate my version of how things had happened.
Thinking about the car set a memory flickering in the back of my mind. I’d seen something related to that set up, something useful…Something important.
I needed to spend an evening in the studio getting my latest batches of photographs in order. I hadn’t even delivered the car scene photos to the sheriff’s department and that package included an invoice. I zipped home to change into my everyday clothes and pick up the dog, then back to the studio for an evening of work.
I’d uploaded everything the day before. Now I sorted the car scene pictures into their own folder and made the six-picture proof sheets. I printed those, made a CD, and brought it all up to the computer at the front desk. Someday it would be nice to network these two computers, but I didn’t know how. Maybe Nick did; I’d have to ask him.
I opened up QuickBooks to do the invoice and stared at it stupidly. Tillie usually did this part. She’d set the system up and I had never troubled myself to learn how to use it. It had menu options galore; not as bad as Photoshop, but I’d learned that one at school.
I fiddled and clicked and backtracked and deleted. How could this be so hard? I didn’t want to screw up any existing thing, that was part of the problem, but I didn’t know how to make the existing things line up with the new thing. Frustrating!
How could Tillie walk out on me like that? I’d hurt her feelings, yes, but in the service of Truth and Justice. Things were looking pretty dire for Ty, in case she hadn’t noticed, and more importantly, Roger’s killer was still out there walking around. Possibly even dancing little steps of glee, since nobody but feeble Girlock had so much as asked him where he was on the night in question.
I’d worked myself into a fine state of righteous indignation when the object of my ire pulled up in front of the studio with a screech of tires. She struggled out of the truck, slammed the door, and stomped across the sidewalk, clutching a manila folder. She banged through the studio door and slapped the folder onto the reception counter. “There’s your goddammed secret! This is what you were fishing for, interrogating my husband and following him around. Are you happy now?”
I started to point out that I had not followed Ben around, although in fairness I had considered it. Tillie had turned pink with fury, so I let it slide.
I got up and stepped cautiously toward the counter. I could take the Tillster in a fair fight, but a woman in a rage was a dangerous animal. I opened the folder gingerly. Its contents rocked me on my heels. “Whoa ho ho!”
I could never have predicted this, not in a million years. The folder held photographs—rather good ones, all black and white—of Diana frolicking at the spring, wearing nothing but her birthday suit and a big, shiny smile.
Al fresco. In the buff. In other words, stark naked.
She did not frolic alone. A man appeared in some of the photographs, but never full frontal. Not even his face; just part of an arm or a leg and that much only in a few shots. The best one caught him climbing out of the pool with his back to the camera.
Ben, the sly dog, had been doing a little covert photography in his spare time, producing a fine series of ex-girlfriend nudie pictures, something to cherish over the years as he and his wife grew older and fatter.
“Oh, me, oh, my.” I leafed through the photos again. “Oh, Tillie.”
“Awful, isn’t it?” Tears shimmered in her eyes, but didn’t fall. Judging by the redness and the smudged mascara, she’d been doing a lot of crying. Now she seemed ready to move on to the next stage: retribution.
“Awful that he took them,” I said, “but they’re pretty good photographs.” I held up one where a band of light from the setting sun striped across the frame, lighting up Diana’s head, shoulders, and breasts like a Madonna in a Renaissance painting. “This one is good enough to show.”
“Penny!” Color rose in Tillie’s cheeks again.
Not the best moment for a critique. “Sorry!” I shrugged sheepishly.
She glared at me and growled in the back of her throat. That pink streak in her hair gave her a wild aspect. She clenched her fists and shook from head to toe. I took a step back, actually afraid she might charge over the counter at me.
Then she drew in a huge breath and let it out in a long growly huff. “I’m not mad at you. Not really. If you hadn’t stirred things up, I never would have gone looking for Ben’s stupid secret, and I never would have found these—these—Rrraaahhh!” She shrieked at the ceiling, shaking her fists.
“And that’s better?”
“Of course it’s better! You think I want my husband keeping his own personal stash of his own personal pornography in my house? Now it’s out, now I know, and now I can make him pay for it for the rest of his miserable, rotten, lying, cheating life.”
“Sounds fair to me.” Poor Ben. “So you’re going to stick it out? Stay with him, I mean?”
“Oh, he doesn’t get off that easily. No way. I want revenge, with a capital Grrrrrrrrr.”
“You go!” I grinned at her, or rather gave her an apologetic grimace grin. “Are you sure you’re not mad at me?”
She thought about it, then shook her head. “Nope. All the mad belongs to Ben.”
“Want some tea? Nice and cold. And there’s health food cookies from Marion.”
“No ice cream?”
“I ate all the ice cream. It’s been a rough week.”
Jake led us to the kitchen. I brought the folder. We needed to study those pictures, however hard it might be for her, to figure out when they were taken and who the guy was. We might be able to recognize something about him, if we put our minds to it.
“We’re a little low on supplies,” I said. “I didn’t get to the store on Friday.”
“It’s my job to keep the kitchen stocked.”
“It’s been a weird week.” I opened the plastic container of cookies and stood by the counter, holding it in my hands. “I am so sorry about last Monday, Tillie. I should have found a better way.”
“You couldn’t help it and it turned out you were right. Ben really did have something to hide.”
“I could have tried to head him off or change the subject or something.”
“Nope.” Tillie shook her head. “This is his fault. Not yours and not mine.”
She got the Flintstones glasses out of the cupboard and filled them with iced tea. “I don’t know what I was thinking with that stupid note. This job is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Let’s forget about the note,” I said. “Let’s forget about Thursday. Let’s forget about Monday. In fact, let’s screw the whole damn week.”
“Screw the whole damn week!” Tillie shouted. Jake tucked his tail between his legs and scooted under the table. “Not you, Jakey.” Tillie bent to coax him back out with coos and smooches.
We sat. Tillie gave Jake a cookie and then looked at me sideways. “C
an I have my job back?”
“You never lost it, because none of last week happened, remember? Except for Hank getting arrested. We keep that.”
“What! How?”
Points to the new girl, beating Tillie in the gossip division! I caught her up on events since the last time I’d seen her. She oohed and oh, no-ed in all the right places. When I told her about seeing Ben right after the bull chased me, her eyes narrowed. I hastily assured her that Hank had practically admitted to letting Blackberry out. Not in front of anyone else, but good enough for me.
“I am so glad he’s the guilty one,” she said. “Now nobody we like has to go to prison.”
“The thing is, it might not be Hank. The drugs, yes. They caught him red-handed. But maybe not Roger. So, Tillie, if you can stand it, we kind of need to look at those photographs. That guy, whoever he is, could be the Louise.”
“The who?”
I stared at her for a moment. More than anything, her non-knowledge of the Thelma and Louise theory exposed how deep the rift between us had been. Normally, we would already have examined it from all possible angles. I filled her in, briefly setting out the variations. She hummed and nodded, getting the point immediately and with way more enthusiasm than Ty had shown.
But when I got to the end, she cocked her and said, “I didn’t realize Thelma and Louise were gay.”
“They’re not. They weren’t. It’s more like an overlay than a direct match. Think of it as sort of thematic.”
“Thematic. Got it.” She pulled the folder toward her and opened it with tightened lips. “Let’s do it.” Let it never be said that Tillerina lacked courage when courage was required.
I scooched my chair over so we could look at them together. “First, let’s see if we can figure out when they were taken.”
She studied the photos one by one, a grim look on her face. I admired her. It had to be hard, looking at Diana’s magnificent figure, knowing yourself to be built on the hefty side. It was hard enough for me and I’m in good shape. Not Diana’s kind of shape; there are limits to what running can do for the womanly form.
I concentrated on the non-Diana aspects of each picture. Ben must have been higher than the pool, probably hidden in the rocks along the path. He must have been shooting slightly from the west, judging by the angle of that beam of light and the shadows on the right sides of boulders. “Close to sunset, I guess.”
“Hm.”
One picture showed a champagne bottle and a pair of plastic glasses leaning against a rock at the edge of the pool. Another caught the edge of a rumpled pile of clothes.
“Look.” Tillie pointed at a picture of Diana posing on a rock with her head thrown back. She tapped her finger on a bunch of wildflowers. “See these flowers?”
“Yes?”
“Those are Mexican hats. I remember them because they don’t look like hats.”
“They really don’t,” I said. “But I like them anyway. They come out later, after the bluebonnets are done, when the hot colors start to predominate. May—mid-May—maybe June. I think they go on all summer, but at least we have one endpoint. Good call, Tillie!”
“I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you do. More.”
“Speaking of bottoms, who the heck is this guy?” I pulled out the best photo of the mystery man, a clear shot of his backside from the shoulders to the knees, as he climbed out of the pool.
“It can’t be Hank,” Tillie said. “Not skinny enough.”
“Plus if it was Hank, there’d be beer cans lying all over the place. Can you imagine going skinny-dipping with Hank?”
We shared a horrified shudder and recovered by eating more cookies.
“It could be Dare, maybe.” I turned the photo from side to side. “But I think he’s a bit stockier.”
“It can’t be Dare.” Tillie tapped the photo of the champagne bottle. “No way.”
“Good catch. Hm. When did they start going out?”
“Way before May, if these are from this year.”
I looked at the back, suddenly remembering a lab would’ve dated each print. Blank. “He developed these himself, in my darkroom, so these are definitely from this year.”
Tillie stared at me, eyes round, mouth open. “He made these here? In my place of work? Right under our noses?” She started looking around the kitchen, eyes catching glassware, dish towels, odds and ends, like she was going to get up and start throwing things.
I grabbed her hands and caught her gaze. I spoke in a low, calm voice. “He’s barred for life, don’t worry. But first we catch the bad guy. Then you punish Ben. Okay?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Okay.” She turned back to the photos. “Okay.”
I gave her a few seconds, then picked up where we left off. “So she’s been dating Dare for many months at this point. Which means she’s cheating on him, as well as falling off the wagon.”
“And there’s Ben hiding in the bushes taking nudie pictures like the most pathetic loser fool of an asshole that ever lived!” Tillie shook the photo at me. “This is so pitiful!”
“It really is.” I laughed. “Poor Ben. Trapped in the past, taking his sneaky photos, worrying about you finding them. Then here comes Detective Trigg, backing him into a corner saying, ‘Confess! Confess!’ He must have walked around with his boxers in a bunch all week long.”
Tillie giggled. I giggled. We fell into an all-out giggle fest. After a while, we tapered off and sat there wiping our eyes, trying not to look at each other, to keep from starting up again.
I said, “I’ll bet this whole picture thing was one of those last gasps, you know? When a guy realizes that he’s married and his life has changed and he can’t quite get a grip on it. Now that it’s out in the open, I’ll bet he gives it up without a whimper.”
“Oh, there will be whimpering,” Tillie assured me. “Whimpering, wailing, begging for mercy. It used to be me trying to please him. Well, the spur’s on the other boot now.”
I toasted her new position in her marriage. “But I feel sad for Diana.”
“What!”
“I do. It looks like she’s having fun here, and probably she thought so too, at the moment, but this isn’t what she wants. I know it. When she thinks about this day, if she ever does, she must cringe. She’s worked so hard to get sober and be good at her job. Dare might not be the One, but he’s a giant step in the right direction. Whoever this guy is, he’s no good and she knows it. But he’s got some kind of hold on her, some special draw…”
Tillie had listened to my defense of Diana with a slight curl to her lip. Now she conceded one small point. “He’s got a great butt.”
Fair enough. “It is a mighty fine butt.”
“I might keep this one,” Tillie said. “Cut out the Diana part and pin it up on the fridge. Between you and me, Ben’s rear view is nowhere near this good. He’s got love handles out to here.” She illustrated with her own figure.
And a sizeable beer gut, but we didn’t have a shot of this guy’s belly, so that was neither here nor there. I doubted Butt Guy had a gut. His trim back and toned legs suggested a man who got regular exercise of a structured variety.
“Could it be Roger Bainbridge?” I tried to put imaginary pants on the man, but it wasn’t easy.
“He was pretty fit, I think,” Tillie said. “It would help if there was one with them standing side by side so we could see how tall he is. Bainbridge was kind of tallish.”
“Not as tall as Ty or Ben.”
“But we know it’s not either of them anyway.”
“True.” I sighed. “Well, there’s only one thing to do. We’ll to have to get out and look at the bare butt of every single man in this county.”
Tillie shrieked with glee. “Like Cinderella, only men’s backsides instead of ladies’ feet!”
That set us off again, howling with laughter.
“Drop ‘em, pardner!” I tried to sound like the law. “Show us your rear or we’ll haul your
ass in for questioning.”
“We could have a Wet Boxer contest at the Hat Trick.”
“Hey, that could make money! We have the contest here and take pictures. We could do a calendar.”
“Line ‘em up and strip ‘em down.”
I sobered up again. “This doesn’t necessarily help us, though. Help Ty, I mean.”
“Yes, it does,” Tillie said. “For one thing, it proves Diana was two-timing Dare with someone who is not Ben.”
“Not Ben. Not Hank. And not Sid.”
“Definitely not Sid.”
“That leaves one guy on my list—Carson Caine.”
“Carson Caine is on your list?” She picked up the butt picture again and studied it closely. “I have a naked picture of Carson Caine?”
“Except he’s got an alibi. Or also it could be Roger Bainbridge, which is where the not helping comes in.”
“Oh, right. Except that no, it does. If Dare found out about this, the jealousy would make him crazy.” She spoke with authority. “That gives him the perfect motive to kill Bainbridge. Any little thing might set him off.”
“He’s got an alibi too, although nobody’s checked it. But jealousy does make the most sense as a motive. Jealousy or loyalty, in the alternative where Diana killed Roger in self-defense.”
“I vote for the jealousy.” Tillie’s eyes took on a fiery gleam. “If I’d caught Ben out there skinny-dipping with that tramp, I would’ve pushed him off the nearest cliff.”
Chapter 25
After Tillie left, I popped a frozen dinner in the microwave and took Jake out back for a short stroll while it cooked. The sun had set while we’d been yakking, leaving a dark red stain along the horizon between the low buildings of the downtown area. I decided to take a spin around the courthouse, stretch all six of our legs and catch a breath of warm air. I loved the quiet of Lost Hat after everyone else closed up shop. No hum of traffic, no sirens wailing, no airplanes roaring overhead. Instead we get crickets, the occasional dog barking, maybe a truck rumbling past on a side street.