Mortal Remains in Maggody

by Joan Hess

  Jim Bob let the sunshine wash over him like he was in a hot tub with a hot number. Life was verging on perfect, even if his screwy wife was inside shouting at the walls. A tidy sum for letting them use the house, and as the owner, the right to be there to watch over his property. And he sure as hell was going to watch over Gwenneth D’Amourre. When that Hollywood woman had called to say how grateful Miss D’Amourre would be if he allowed them to use the house, why, Jim Bob had been obliged to cross his legs to keep from wetting his pants. He’d recognized the name immediately, in that he always managed to catch a movie or two in the motel room when he was down in Hot Springs for the Municipal League tomfoolery. Tanya Makes the Team, he thought with a lazy grin. Gawd, she’d made the team all right, and done it damn well.

  He lowered his foot and pushed to set the hammock into motion, then lapsed into a most intriguing fantasy.

  “But I’m not sure if the turquoise taffeta is quite right,” Mrs. Jim Bob said to the doorway. “I suppose a widow woman might wear something dark, although there’s no reason why it has to be dowdy. My navy wool with the lace collar might be better. What do you think?” She waited politely for a moment. “No, I guess you’re not the one to give wardrobe advice, are you? I think I’ll see if Lottie’s stopped chattering.”

  This time the telephone began to ring, and Mrs. Jim Bob decided to allow Perkins’s eldest to work undisturbed.

  “But Raz,” Ruby Bee said plaintively, having already tried sternness and also a futile stab at reasonableness, “Marjorie is a barnyard animal. She’s supposed to be outside.”

  Raz loosed a stream of tobacco juice into a conveniently situated coffee can. “No, she don’t care for it. The gnats get in her eyes and she gets all nervous and jumpity.” He beamed at his pride and joy, who was snoozing peaceably on the sofa.

  Ruby Bee tried not to wince at the sight of his stained stubbles of teeth and crumb-encrusted whiskers, or to allow herself to dwell on the miasma of the room created by equal contributions from the owner and his pet. “They can’t use your house if there’s a sow in it. Don’t you want the money?”

  “What fer?” He cackled. “I got everything Marjorie and me needs. We got us a color tellyvision, a VCR with a clicker, and a new icebox stocked with frozen entrées. Marjorie is particular about the brands. She gets all het up if the food don’t match the picture on the box.”

  “Where are you getting all that money?”

  Raz spat into the can, then hooked his thumbs on the straps of his overalls and swelled up like a bloated carcass in a pond. “I got my ways, Rubella Belinda Hanks, and they’s none of your business.”

  “They’re probably Arly’s business,” she retorted in her most snippety voice. “I heard someone’s running a still up on the ridge again, not too far from Robin Buchanon’s old place. Wouldn’t be anyone in this room, would it?” When he flinched, she moved in (verbally—not physically) for the kill. “Now, if I’m busy cooking for these movie people, I won’t have time to pass along my suspicions to Arly. But they won’t come if you don’t agree to let them use your house and barn, and they might not understand why there’s a sow in the living room.”

  “I reckon I can run the hose and make Marjorie a nice wallow,” he said sullenly. His cheek bulged, but he caught her glare and sucked it back in. “But only for a day or two, and they pay me in cash. I ain’t gonna mess with some damn-fool piece of paper. Cain’t buy corn with paper.”

  Ruby Bee lifted her chin and sailed into the fresh air outside the shack, feeling pleased with herself despite the worrisome possibility that she was aiding and abetting Raz Buchanon in the act of something that smelled a sight worse than his front room.

  “Okay, here’s the way it goes,” Hal said. He was sprawled on the leather couch in his office, a cigarette between his lips and his unclad body glistening from a session in the sauna. Although he took sessions under a tanning lamp three times a week, his skin resolutely remained alabaster except for the sprinkling of freckles and moles. “The mother finds out Loretta’s been sneaking out at night to let Billy Joe feel her up. She tells the father and he goes into a rage because they’ll lose the farm if Cooter refuses to marry her.”

  Carlotta nodded as she found her notebook and a pencil, and sat down behind Hal’s desk to listen to him spill his ideas as quickly as he spilled his seed. She would diligently record them, then throw them away and make whatever revisions she felt were needed to the script. Hal never remembered his suggestions, particularly when he had done several lines of coke.

  “Zachery learns about the trysts,” she said, trying not to look at him. When he was naked, it was difficult not to think of the menu at a luau. “Then what?”

  “He’ll drag her outside to spank her. Do these primitives have woodsheds? For that matter, do they have—what do you call ’em?—opposable thumbs?”

  “I’ll check on the availability of woodsheds.” Carlotta scribbled a note in the margin.

  “So he drags her wherever and orders her to drop her pants. He’s going to spank her, but once he starts slapping those lily-white mounds and ogling the red marks, he—”

  “Gwenneth won’t go for this.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Hal said with a short laugh. “She knows she’d better do what I tell her to do, so just get it down and quit interrupting. I’ve got to have total silence when I’m in a creative mode. I’ve got to flow. Okay, close up on him as he throws her to the ground and starts scrambling out of his pants. She leaps to her feet and runs—”

  “With her pants around her ankles?”

  “She leaps to her feet, kicks off her pants—I like it, I like it—and runs through the gate and across the road to where this widow lives. I am on a roll tonight, n’est-ce pas? Let me hear what we’ve got thus far.”

  Carlotta read his scenario in a bored monotone, irritated because she was already late for her aerobics class. “And pounds on the door?”

  “There she is, tears running down one set of cheeks and the other set rosy from the spanking, and the father bellowing for her to come back. The widow—give her a real hick name—the widow hustles the girl in and locks the door.”

  “Okay, Loretta’s in the widow’s house.”

  “Wait a minute; I’m losing the flow.” He walked into the washroom, but continued talking between gusty snorts. “Are we gonna have a problem with this mayor’s wife?”

  “Probably. I promised her a few lines, but we’ll have to tiptoe through the scene. Let’s make sure we shoot it after we’ve used her house.”

  Hal came back into the office, a towel around his waist, and made himself a drink from the bar. “Are we ready to roll?”

  “Everybody’s agreed to the usual terms, and Fuzzy’s willing to do the technical side.” Carlotta hesitated for a minute, not sure if she wanted to prolong the conversation with her boss. At last her innate sense of responsibility overcame her distaste. “When I talked to him, he sounded tight, really tight. From what I’ve picked up, he’s back on booze and his wife left him several weeks ago. He’s on the edge, Hal. We might see if we can corral someone else until our boy either implodes, explodes, or regains consciousness in court.”

  “If you can find someone willing to work nonunion in a hellhole three thousands miles from civilization, do it,” Hal said, displaying his typical compassion. “Tell you what, baby, you’ve got enough of my input to finish the scene and have it on my desk in the morning. I’m going to run a little powdery present by Marty’s and lay on some more crap about setting up a meeting with the swish at Cinerotica. Gawd, I hate swishes. They’re so damn arrogant.”

  After Hal dressed and stumbled away, Carlotta poured herself a drink and sat down behind her desk in the adjoining room to type up the scene. She toyed with the idea of Zachery raping the widow, but dismissed it (at least for the moment) and wrote out a charmingly steamy encounter between Loretta and Billy Joe in the widow’s own bed. Out of mischievousness, she had the widow discover the two and demand coitus
interruptus. The actor who would portray Billy Joe would be incensed, of course, which was why she devoted an inordinate amount of time frustrating him via the script.

  She was typing briskly when the telephone rang, and she mentally debated the ramifications of ignoring it. However, she’d given her office number to a rugged young actor who’d attempted to sound interested in her rather than her proximity to Hal. “Glittertown,” she said into the receiver. “Lowenstein here.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Hey, Fuzzy,” Carlotta said, disappointed. “We were just talking about you. Were your balls burning?”

  “Naw, the penicillin took care of it. This is important. I ran over to Vegas yesterday. Took a room in one of those seedy joints out by the airport. Guess which soft-porn movie was available for a modest price?”

  “I just write them, Fuzzy. Once they’re made, I don’t care if they’re the feature at Rockefeller Center after the Rockettes flash their panties at the tourists.”

  “I think you’ll care,” Fuzzy said in a dark voice. “It was a new flick called Prickly Passion, starring Gwenneth D’Amourre and Frederick Marland.” He paused for a minute, and she heard the tinkly collision of ice cubes. “I watched the damn thing. This well-endowed prospector finds a busty, half-naked woman wandering in the desert. He takes her back to his shack, and the two of—”

  “Enough.” Carlotta took off her glasses to rub her eyes and temples, then drained her drink. “Are you sure you didn’t drink a quart of rotgut tequila, and watch the film in your dreams?”

  “In your dreams, Carlotta. No, I even brought back the card with the times and prices of the movies. There were a couple of scenes we left on the floor, but I had plenty of time to recognize the prospector and the prostitute—and I’m familiar with each and every mole and freckle, including that little butterfly tattoo Gwenneth’s so proud of.”

  “Damn it, that means there was a pirated copy, and now there are apt to be thousands of illegal copies floating around. We’re all contracted for a piece of the net. What are the chances this unknown distributor’s going to send a check?”

  “About the time we go ice skating on the corner of Hollywood and Vine,” he said with a morose sigh. “So who filched the tape and sold it? What’d we have on the set—three of us and the five actors? Hal and I did the editing ourselves. The negative’s in the vault. There’s no way anyone else could have gotten a copy.”

  “You know, Fuzzy, Anderson said something about seeing a version of Satan’s Sister that contained some of the stuff we decided was too risky. It’s beginning to look as though we have a full-time pirate in our midst. I’ll see what I can find out before we leave for the next one.”

  “Did Hal try to give me the boot?”

  “Oh, good Lord, no. He was really sorry to hear about your marital problem, but he said he was thrilled to work with you again.”

  “Like hell he did.”

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “Would the pope take a check?”

  Carlotta was smiling as she replaced the receiver.

  I was on the way out of Merganser’s office when I ran into Plover. He suggested coffee, and we went into the break room at the back of the barracks. While he played host, I flopped down on an ugly sofa and said, “Merganser was helpful, in a terrifying way. We agreed it wasn’t arson for profit, and it doesn’t look as if anyone’s trying to cover up anything. If it’s revenge, no one’s been harmed physically or financially. That leaves us with a nut case.”

  Plover handed me a chipped mug and sat down across from me. “How nutty?”

  I tasted the coffee and decided it might be better used to repair roads. I put the mug on the floor and said, “The profiles vary. It could be a thrill-seeker, someone who craves the excitement of the trucks roaring in and the firemen dragging out the equipment. This one, most commonly, tends to be male and starts setting fires in his teens and early twenties. Problems at home, low self-esteem, lack of appropriate positive role models, possibly with a sexual dysfunction.”

  “That describes our witness,” Plover said flatly.

  “I know, and I’m going to talk to him later today. I’ll verify his explanation for being on the road and discreetly ask where he was when the other fires were discovered.” I paused as I recalled Merganser’s second option. “Or it may be the work of a psycho who’s been starting fires out of some misguided idea that he—or she—is under orders from unseen powers.”

  “Why has he surfaced in the last month? Why hasn’t he been torching abandoned buildings all along?”

  “Beats me,” I said, reaching for the mug and then catching myself. “There’s no one new in Maggody. I guess I need to check in Emmet and Hasty.”

  Plover raised his eyebrows ever so slightly. “Good idea, Arty. Perhaps the fire chief can help you with the investigation.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Sergeant Innocent shrugged. “It means you can ask what’s-his-name if anyone has moved to Emmet in the last two months. He looks like he’d know—especially if it was a female.”

  I tried to maintain a normal tone, but I didn’t have laudable success. “And what’s that supposed to mean? Wade’s a nice guy. He’s a county extension agent and contributes a lot of free time to the volunteer fire department. He’s the one that keeps tabs on the equipment, makes sure the paperwork gets done, and supervises the training sessions.”

  “Did Merganser tell you that firemen have been known to start fires so they can be heroes?”

  I stood up, kicking over the mug in my haste, and headed for the door. As I reached it, though, I stopped and attempted to sort through the anger and indignation swirling inside me like fierce red sparks. “I don’t know what’s bothering you,” I said without turning around (and thus startling a baby-faced corporal so badly that he bumped into a wall). “All we do is go to the movies or have dinner maybe twice a month. What you do the rest of the time is your business—since I sure as hell have no part in it.”

  “I thought that was what you wanted.”

  I made myself look back at him. “I didn’t say it wasn’t, Plover. You’re entitled to privacy, just as I am. For all I know, you’ve got a wife and three kids stashed somewhere, or an insatiable passion for some college girl.”

  “You’re the one who’s in a self-inflicted cocoon.”

  I thought of several devastating retorts, but I realized my face was flushed and my eyes were beginning to sting. I hurried down the hallway and out into the parking lot, willing myself to do so with no more than professional briskness. Chief of Police Ariel Hanks had places to go and witnesses to question. She did not have time to engage in a childish exchange with a man who fancied himself an amateur shrink.

  She drove all the way back to Maggody and parked in front of the PD before she burst into tears. One tough cookie, that Chief of Police Ariel Hanks.

  “A house across the road from Raz’s place?” Ruby Bee said into the receiver. “There’s nothing directly across, but Dahlia O’Neill and her granny don’t live but a hop and a skip north of there.”

  “Fantastic,” Carlotta said. “Can we use the house? We’ve had to do a few more revisions and add a character. She doesn’t have to live in the immediate vicinity, but it would make the shooting go faster.”

  Ruby Bee didn’t bother to tell her that everyone in town not only knew about the latest addition to the cast but also knew what she intended to wear and how she planned to have her hair fixed. “I don’t reckon Dahlia’s granny will mind, since she’s down in Jessieville visiting kin. Dahlia can be right ornery, though.”

  “What’ll it take? We can go one hundred dollars, one-fifty max. It’s only two interiors, so we’ll be done in no more than a couple of hours.”

  Ruby Bee wasn’t sure how to break the news to this nice woman from Hollywood. She finally decided there was no tactful way to go about it. “Dahlia has her heart set on being in the movie. She’s been moping around like a mot
herless calf ever since she heard about it, and poor Kevin’s fit to be tied.”

  “There’s no other house near the shack?”

  “Sorry, honey, but the only other persons who live out that way are Perkins and his eldest, and I’d sooner cozy up to a grizzly bear as ask him.”

  Carlotta was also renowned for her flexibility. “Okay, we’ll go with this Dahlia woman. Give me a quick rundown: How old is she, and what does she look like?”

  Ruby Bee did so.

  The ensuing silence crackled all the way from Hollywood to Maggody, and you could almost see people in New Mexico and Arizona gazing up at the telephone lines, asking themselves what in tarnation was going on. Ruby Bee was wondering if they’d been disconnected when Carlotta said, “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “’Fraid not,” Ruby Bee said sadly.

  “Oh,” said Carlotta in a faraway voice, which was not surprising in that she was in what most of Maggody considered nigh on to a foreign country, where folks ate raw fish and sat around naked in oversized buckets of boiling water.

  Estelle came into the bar and grill and glanced curiously at Ruby Bee, who was clutching the receiver but not saying a word. Her expression was impossible to make heads or tails of, except that she looked perturbed.

  “Is there someone on the line?” Estelle asked. When there was no reply, she went around the bar, poured herself a glass of sherry, and sat down on her stool to wait for further developments, such as a word being spoken into the receiver.

  It was a good five minutes of toe-twitching tedium before Ruby Bee said, “Okay, I’ll ask her. You sure about this …?”