“ ‘One afternoon, late in our visit, Marcus and I were allowed to go boating alone in Central Park. The day was hot—it was late July—and it did seem cooler on the pond where there were many couples in the small rowboats similar to the one that Marcus had hired. It was such a relief to be away from our mothers and on the cool water. We rowed and talked for several hours.
“ ‘It was on a Saturday that we went boating. On Monday, Mother and I came back to Texas.’ ”
The waiter delivered our dinners, cautioning as they always do in Mexican restaurants, “Be careful. Your plate is hot.”
When I was younger, I always obeyed the rule and never touched the hot plate. Now, in my newfound independence, I rebelliously readjusted the angle of the “hot” plate before I started to eat. Small gains in autonomy were like giant steps to me. “I hope you like this,” I said. “I’ve been coming here ever since Steven Hyatt brought me on the night we graduated from high school.”
Janie looked dumbfounded. “Honey Huckleberry, that’s just about the meanest thing I ever heard of anybody doing.”
“What?” I asked, but I knew.
“To start a story like that, to get me so caught up in it and all, and then—bang—just stop it cold like that.”
“But that’s my point, Janie. That’s how the story ended. That was my Aunt Eddie’s love story. The only one she ever had to tell.” I grinned at Janie’s reaction. “I know how you feel. I felt the same way the first time Mother told it to me. Just imagine. Going to New York and rowing around Central Park for two hours was all the romance Aunt Eddie ever had to put in her memory book.”
Janie’s eyes misted. “That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” she agreed.
Although we lingered over coffee, Steven Hyatt never joined us, and finally, about eight o’clock, we headed toward the south side.
As we crossed the parking lot to the house, Janie stumbled and almost fell. She supported herself by leaning heavily on a van parked in the last slot nearest my property. “Damn, Honey, I almost turned my ankle on something.”
We both looked down, and in the gathering darkness, I saw a loose pile of stones on the smooth asphalt. “Oh, I know what you stumbled on. That’s from Joaquin’s wheelbarrow. It must have fallen out when he moved it earlier. Can you walk?”
While Janie rotated her ankle to see if it worked, I thought I heard voices in the yard. Leaving her to struggle with her injury, I peeked around the van. “Oh, my God,” I said as I snapped back behind the sheltering vehicle.
“What’s wrong?” Janie asked as she simultaneously hobbled to peer over the hood.
I grabbed her by the shirtsleeve and pulled her back. We stood side by side, our rear ends pressing against the metal of the van, as I gasped for the air to give her an explanation. “You know that story I told you about Aunt Eddie?” I asked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“About how sad it was and her not having any life to remember?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“Well, I thought about that story all my life and decided I wasn’t going to be like Aunt Eddie. When I got old, I wanted to have some memories … something more than a sail around a pond. You know what I mean?”
“I think so,” she said, but she didn’t sound like it. She sounded like she thought I was crazy and if she agreed with me, I’d be sane again. “Honey, what’s going on? Who are those people standing in your yard?”
“Well, it’s Steven Hyatt. You know him. And Silas Sampson. Did I introduce you at the funeral? And Joaquin. I know you met him. And the other one, the red-haired one? That’s my Marcus. That’s Harry Armstead from South Padre.”
“Your love?” Janie was almost as excited as if I had told her Harry was a Mafia hit man. Pulling away from my hold on her sleeve, she stood on tiptoe—the sprained ankle seemingly forgotten—for a better look at him.
“Not exactly. Try lov-er,” I said. “I wonder what he’s doing here?”
“I think that should be obvious. He’s come to see you.”
“Not here, he hasn’t. He never comes here. I always go there. No,”—and I was emphatic—“not in my house,” I said in the same tone that one uses when they read, “Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin.”
As I came around the van, anger and frustration fueling my steps, I heard all four men say, “Honey!” in such a way that my name seemed to echo in the night.
“Honey,” Harry said again, all by himself and with affection, the way my name was supposed to sound like when it wasn’t meaning my name.
“This man claims to know you, Honey,” said Silas, acting officious but I imagine secretly delighted that he had a legitimate reason to be asking this stranger what business it was of his to stand there and speak intimately to me.
“Honey,” Harry called for the third time, still trying to capture my singular attention. “What’s going on? This fellow says he’s a copper. He says there’s been a murder?”
A murder? It had all happened so long ago in my mind, but by the calendar’s count, it had only been five days since I’d left Harry in a parking lot in Brownsville where I think he had been trying to tell me that he loved me.
Before I could answer him, I heard a scream of such proportions that if I hadn’t known its source, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that it came straight from Hell.
Because I was the closest, I reached her first, so I was the second one to see what had caused Janie to cry out in such fright. She was standing next to the open door of the van where we had hidden to spy out my yard. Her hands were over her now silent mouth, and my eyes followed her wide, fixed stare into the darkened interior.
Jimmy the Geek’s eyes were open, too, and I knew that when they closed again, it would be by a coroner’s hand, and it would be for the last time. Jimmy was dead, lying in a pool of blood in the backseat of what I now recognized as a new green Plymouth Voyager.
My scream wasn’t as loud as Janie’s.
TWENTY–EIGHT
I’ll admit that what I did involved some risk taking, but I didn’t know how else to get a message to Stephen that I needed help. Actually, the only risk was if a policeman called and got the answering machine before someone answered my telephone, because if the receiver wasn’t picked up after four rings, you could hear my breathless pleading, “S-t-e-p-h-e-n. I need the original note you found so I can examine it for clues. Please find a way to get it to me.” And I told him where to leave it. But at the rate my telephone was being jerked up every time it even looked like it was activated, my worst fear was that Stephen wouldn’t get the message either.
I’d found time to slip the new cassette reel into the machine right after we’d all brought Janie in the house when she fainted. I’d thrown wet washrags over the banister at Steven Hyatt and then had run back into my room to insert the tape and record the message before joining them downstairs. It might sound as if I was not sympathetic enough with Janie’s predicament, but remember that I knew what happened when you found a body—not the fainting part, but the police part; them coming and going throughout your house, never bothering to tell you what’s going on. The thems talking to the theys. By the time I joined them in the living room, Janie had recovered from her swoon, and we could hear sirens in the distance.
In her greatest imagination, fainting would have had to be last on Janie’s list of What to Do When You Find the Body. I knew for a fact that she lay awake nights running investigations through her head, trying to make use of all the crime-related information she’d absorbed and stored over the thirty or more years she’d been a mystery fan. Now, here she’d had her big, and probably only, chance of a lifetime, and she’d blown it, screaming and fainting. That’s the last thing a pro would want to do upon finding a body.
Janie sat up on my pink couch, supported on either side by Steven Hyatt and Harry while Joaquin and Silas towered over her. They were so solicitous that I wanted to shout out, “Hey, I saw him, too,” but instead, I reached thro
ugh the solid torsos bracketing Janie and patted her knee. She started to cry, and the men dissolved into thin air, so I sat down beside her and took her hand in mine. I knew she was a lot more distraught at how she had reacted than at finding the body.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said in a low voice.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“It wasn’t what I expected,” she continued to explain.
“I know,” I said.
“No, I mean you plan and plan how you’re going to react when you see a victim. How calm and level-headed you’re going to be, and then all of a sudden—wham—there’s the body, and there you are screaming and fainting.”
“I know,” I said.
“No, you don’t. You didn’t faint.”
“I screamed.”
“But you didn’t faint.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but, remember, Janie, this is my second body.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said and I thought she brightened up just as Silas opened the front door to let in the guys from the black-and-whites and beige and blues and just plain white whites. I’ve never seen so many police cars in my life.
I pulled on Silas’s shoulder and when he bent down, I asked him if there had been that many when I’d found Steven Miller.
“Sure. Why?” he’d wanted to know.
“Nothing. Just glad I don’t have any neighbors, that’s all.”
This was still Tuesday. Still the day we’d buried Steven Miller. That meant that I had four more days before I could visit Peggy at the cleaners and tell her that she was right. The guy that came this time—after all Silas was already here—was the right kind of cop. He was short, lean, and ugly, and his burning black eyes didn’t miss a trick. Lennox was his name; crime was his game. There was no way anyone was going to lie to this cop about telephone calls or suspects or motives or nothing and get away with it.
“Did you know the deceased?” I heard him ask Janie, and while she was explaining about seeing Jimmy at the funeral that very morning—she’d recovered nicely from the shock of discovering the body—I took the opportunity to tug at Harry’s sleeve and pull him toward the kitchen.
Before I could speak to him, he’d gathered me in his arms and given me a big kiss that was not so much comforting as lustful, but one from which I gathered much comfort anyway. I sighed, leaned my head against the collar of his navy cotton jacket for a long beat and then some. I just stood there slumped against him. Finally, knowing our private time together would be at a premium, I asked, “Harry, did I ever tell you hello? And what did you do with Bailey?” I belatedly looked around for the dog. His wet nose pressing against me would be very comforting right now. Like Harry’s arms.
“No,” he answered. “No, luv, we went straight from eye contact to screams. Honey, can you explain what’s going on here? And Bailey is still on the island. With Rosa.” I liked that he asked gently, and his composed attitude soothed me enough so that I could quickly explain what he’d inquired about: my return home, Steven Miller, Silas, Steven Hyatt and, of course, Janie Bridges.
“Are any of these Stevens the one you kept mumbling about in Padre?” he asked.
“Oh, no, that’s another Steven or Stephen. I didn’t mean to keep it all from you, but when I was in Padre, I just didn’t think it was going to be so all-fired important. It started with a telephone call that was a mistake, but not really a mistake. I mean it was the right number but for the wrong reason. Then he called again …”
“Again!” Silas Sampson was standing in the kitchen doorway. “Honey, you told me you never heard from him again.”
Wish I’d kept a log like I’d originally planned. Wish I’d written down in it who I’d told about Stephen. .. who about the money … and whom I’d lied to. And why I’d thought it was important to lie in the first place.
Detective Silas Sampson was all business. “Miss Huckleberry, we need you downtown to answer a few questions. This is Captain Lennox, head of the Investigations Bureau,” he said, formally introducing me to his boss. “He’ll be questioning you … and your friend here,” he added, nodding toward Harry.
“Right,” I said, looking past his shoulder into Captain Lennox’s hard glare. The buck stops here, I thought as I picked up my purse and followed them outside where Janie and Steven Hyatt were driving off in an unmarked car. I slapped my palm against my forehead as Harry opened another police car door for me.
“What’s the matter?” he whispered.
“Nothing,” I told him, but the thought of buck-stopping had reminded of where mucho bucks were just lying around with only a slim sheet of plywood to protect them. I knew I should have done something about the money. I squeezed Harry’s hand and looked ahead at Janie and Steven Hyatt’s heads bent together in conference in the backseat of the car in front of us. Janie seemed fully recovered and was probably telling Steven Hyatt who’d done Jimmy in. I chuckled. Then suddenly I hit my forehead again.
“Now what?” asked Harry.
This time I answered him. Pulling him over to my side of the backseat, I whispered in his ear, just like Janie was doing in the other car and I wondered if we were asking the same question. “What happened to Joaquin?”
TWENTY–NINE
“So, what did you tell him?” I asked Janie when we’d contrived through hand and eye signals to wind up in the ladies’ room in the police station at the same time.
Knowing I meant Captain Lennox, Janie repeated what she’d told the new man in charge. “I was holding onto my sore ankle with one hand and the door latch of the van with the other when I lost my balance and pitched forward. I didn’t fall, but my momentum released the latch and the door swung open. When I straightened up enough to close it, it wouldn’t close all the way.” She’d overcome her earlier squeamishness to add, “Jimmy’s arm had fallen out and was blocking the door,” without batting an eye.
“Then I opened the door to see why it wouldn’t close and I saw him and I screamed. Then you came, and you saw him, and you screamed. And then …”
“Yeah, I know what comes next,” I said. “Did Lennox believe you?”
Janie sounded anything but Texan when she answered with an angry shrug, “So what’s not to believe?” She hadn’t told any lies and was indignant that her veracity might be in doubt.
Well, I had lied, and I’d better remember every one of them, I thought as I hand-combed my hair in the rest room mirror. Or be prepared to confess. To what? To telling a few lies?
“You’re next, Honey,” Janie reminded me, and she didn’t mean the line for the stalls.
Before we left the privacy of the room, Janie had a few questions of her own. Like, now, who was Harry? And, sure enough, she and Steven Hyatt were wondering where Joaquin had got to, but, no, she hadn’t mentioned him to Lennox. And was I in love with Harry or his dog?
Deciding the famous “best defense” might work for me, I told Lennox as I sat down in his smooth, dark wood visitor’s chair, “I think I can clear most of this up for you.” He and Silas and the young girl taking notes looked at me in surprise. Lord, lord, where was that correct, reticent young woman of only a week ago?
“We’re counting on that, Miss Huckleberry,” Lennox replied. “I understand the deceased was coming to see you.” He looked down at his notes. “A prearrangement about a vehicle delivery.”
“Yes. Well, I assume yes. Jimmy was supposed to be bringing me a Plymouth Voyager, and since we … Janie … found the Geek in a Plymouth Voyager, I think we can safely assume … yes.”
“The Geek?”
“Oh, not his name, Captain. Except in my head. I don’t know what his real last name is … was. But my accountant, Steven Bondesky, can tell you. Jimmy the … Jimmy worked for him.”
“We know his real last name,” Lennox said without saying what it was or how he knew it. “Miss Huckleberry, Detective Sampson has filled me in on your original complaint. What … two weeks ago? The phone calls? From Steven threatening your life?” Lennox glanced at S
ilas sitting beside but slightly behind me, “Now Detective Sampson thinks you might have been holding out on him about some follow-up calls.” He looked straight at me. “You shouldn’t oughta have done that, Miss Huckleberry. You’re going to feel real bad if your keeping mum about the calls led to your friend Steven Miller’s death.”
“Yes, I am, Captain, but I still don’t think it would have made any difference. Maybe, but I don’t think so, but …” and I took a deep breath while offering up a silent prayer that Peggy was right. Lennox looked smart enough. “That is why I want to tell you everything now. So no one else gets killed.” They looked more than interested in my next words.
“It all began years ago, and it involves big business and mega money. And the cover-up of a murder in Italy earlier this month.” I had underestimated my audience. They weren’t just interested; they were agog—a word I never thought I’d know the meaning of in my lifetime, but now understood perfectly as I watched the glazed eyes and slack jaws of the professional cops gawking at me. I threw in, “An illegal alien, a revolutionary invention, an explosion—”
“Miss Huckleberry,” Lennox interrupted, “what in the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about telling you everything, helping you to solve this case, but first,” I said, standing up and moving toward Lennox’s desk, “first, I have to make a telephone call.”
It says a lot for the quality and predictability of television programming that he just grunted and said, “Oh, okay,” and let me do it. Time out for a commercial break, I was thinking as I dialed my own number. Who done it, right after this message from our sponsor.
I listened to myself answer my telephone after the fourth ring and immediately punched in my AT&T code for retrieving messages. A tentative “Honey?” from the first caller was not surprising when you consider the message I’d left on the machine. It turned out to be one of the executives from a book line I carried, calling from Boston wanting to know why I wasn’t at the convention. And then as tentative as his first word, he ended the conversation by asking, “Honey, are you all right? I mean, if you need me or something, call me.”
The Complete Honey Huckleberry Box Set Page 15