“What Jackie told us,” I said. “She didn’t try and hide it. Though she left out that whole advantage for her due to murder.”
“I had to look around for a file on her first husband’s death, and that took some work, and it’s interesting in what’s not in it,” Marvin said.
“Like the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime,” I said.
“Like that,” he said. “The first husband started feeling bad and ended up in the hospital, and the doctors couldn’t figure the problem. I think if we dig him up we’ll find out what the problem was. I’m guessing poison. I think this Jackie is an operator. She didn’t kill Farmer while the money was easy, even after the divorce, but at some point my guess is she thought it was a good idea.”
“And Farmer’s wife?”
“That might be a bit more complex. Farmer didn’t like her much, and there had actually been three or four calls to the police by the missing wife, saying he was abusing her. And there was the whole business about her fucking around with someone, and then suddenly she’s gone and so is the guy. Old Police Chief thought it was kind of suspicious, but he couldn’t prove anything and Farmer just went on being Farmer.”
“And Jackie went on being Jackie,” I said.
“Right,” Marvin said. “My guess is she somehow knew what Farmer did, kept it in her back pocket. Why not? She wanted to be rid of the wife too, and then one day she gets the bright idea she can get some money for the body, and then get rid of Farmer too. The time was right with the mother dead and her knowing where the body was and the will lined up to make her golden. She could sit around with her feet up and a fan blowing up her dress for the next ten years and not have to hit a lick at a snake.”
“What about her son?” Leonard said.
“Checked on him,” Marvin said. “Has a jacket. Had a few little notes added to it on a regular basis.” Marvin shifted to pick up another folder, opened it. “All of it petty stuff. Peeping Tom, stealing women’s clothes at the laundry mat. Stuff like that. He got caught on that one and they found selfies of him wearing stolen panties on his head. His history of panty hats was right there. He’s one of those dreamers thinks he’s going to be something he’s too lazy to be, a special effects artist or some such.”
“He told me and Brett just that thing,” I said. “But wearing panties on your head is a long way from murder.”
“Course,” Leonard said, “we don’t know the dead woman in Coca-cola Butterasses coffin is Farmer’s wife.”
“We should know that in a few hours,” Marvin said. “I got some guys in Tyler owe me a favor, so they’re making DNA tests. Can do that stuff quick these days, they take a mind to, and there aren’t a bunch of cases lined up in front of it. That’s where the favor comes in. But I think we know who it is.”
“And probably there’s a dead boyfriend somewhere too,” Leonard said. “You know, the wife is underneath Coconut Butterballs, then there’s a good chance that boyfriend of hers is lying under another dog out there. Farmer killed them, the ex-wife threatened to expose the murdered wife, got some money in the deal, then got Farmer whacked. It’s a tight idea, you think about it.”
“I know I like it,” Marvin said, “but thing is, even with one body on hand from the graveyard, we got to have a bit more reason to dig the other body up.”
“Why would they care if you dug it up?” I said. “They got what they wanted, the money and Farmer dead. Farmer most likely put him there, so why would they bother not letting you check the graves out? It just puts more guilt on him, I’d think.”
“Well, something is bothering them,” Marvin said. “We asked and they said we would need a warrant.”
“That paints things a different color,” Leonard said. “Ah, I got it. The other body, maybe Jackie helped dispose of it. Maybe she helped in the murder of the wife too.”
“Yeah, but still all things point to Farmer, not her,” I said.
“Jackie may have played her hand too far, blackmailing him and killing him on the same night,” Marvin said. “But what I’m thinking is she’s thinking there’s something in that other coffin that points back to her. My guess it might even be something she can explain away, but if she can get rid of the body, dig it up, cremate it and put the boyfriend’s ashes in the flower bed, she’s laid out smooth as silk. I think Farmer had a good idea who stole the body. He may not have known she knew he did what he did, but at that point, someone blackmailing him with his wife’s corpse, he had to have an idea.”
“Why he sent us,” I said. “Had it figured right. They wanted to kill him. He thought he’d be all right if he stayed home, that paying her off would save his neck, but it didn’t.”
“Which brings me to a thought. You see, as Police Chief I have certain restrictions. You know, my hands are tied on some things. But I’m thinking if someone who didn’t have those restrictions was able to find some evidence, maybe not too illegally, but you know, real soon, and it was something a Chief of Police could use, and those people, two guys say, were to present it to me in a fashion where I could find out about it in a good way, and I could use it in court, wouldn’t that be nice?”
“So, you’re talking about us?” Leonard said.
“Maybe,” Marvin said. “You know, there might be something at her house, inside, or somewhere. Something like a big, white truck, which would be a nice place to start, though not quite good enough to finish, but what if they had four hundred thousand dollars under the bed in Farmer’s satchel.”
“That might be hoping too much to find,” Leonard said. “Even for those two guys you’re talking about.”
“I think Jackie is too smart to just poke that satchel under the bed,” I said.
“True,” Marvin said, “but you never know, and you know what, they might have hidden it at the mortuary, but you see, I got this warrant I got to get, and the best I can do is get it tomorrow, and I’m not entirely sure the judge is going to give it to me, not in time, anyway. He’s kind of stickler. But I’m thinking I get enough to pull them in, and get that Scanner fellow in interrogation, I can dangle a fine set of panties in front of him and he’ll spill the beans.”
“You’d dangle panties in front of him?” Leonard said.
“No,” Marvin said, “I think he’s the weak link in all this and he’ll spill with little more than a cup of coffee and me giving him a stern look, but I thought that part about the panties sounded good, so I said it.”
Chance, being part-time at the newspaper, had a day off from work, so we gave her the job of going out to the cemetery road and parking close to where it emptied into a highway. There was a parking lot there that went with a grocery store of some size. She could sit there in her car and see the road clearly.
There was a back way out of the cemetery, but it was a long way, and it stood to reason they would use the shorter route. If they did, if Scanner or Jackie left the place, went home, went anywhere, we would know because Chance would use her cell to let us know. She had on a baseball cap and a loose shirt and shorts and sandals and had her lunch with her in Brett’s star wars lunch box. I think Chance liked playing detective. The idea of it anyway, but after lunch, if she was still sitting there and waiting without news, she might be less interested.
It didn’t take much research to figure out where Jackie and Scanner lived. Scanner still lived with his mom, which was no surprise, and he had a place in the backyard. We knew that because we drove over there in Leonard’s pickup and walked along the walk and went straight up on the porch. We had on khaki clothes and caps that could have fit any city worker doing any kind of city job, jobs that might require someone to go from house to house, or do work inside, say on a gas line or a phone line or electrical problems, plumbing perhaps. We could make a lie go in any direction we needed to.
At the front door Leonard took out the lock picking kit and messed around for awhile, and when he clicked the lock, he discovered there was a dead bolt as well and a chain. He locked the door back with his
tools.
If they had the front door locked like that, it meant they locked it up inside and went out another way. We strolled casually around the side of the house, next to some ill-kept shrubs, and finally we were at a chain link fence with a gate in it. The backyard was high in weeds, but there was a walk along the side of the house and it came to where we stood at the gate. The gate had a padlock on it.
There was an old travel trailer in the yard with grass grown up around it. Behind that was a large shed and the pines in the yard on either side of it had dropped rust-colored needles on the roof making a thick carpet. We could see a padlock on the shed door from where we stood. The sunlight dappled through the pine limbs and leaves and gave the place a camouflage look.
“Like their privacy,” Leonard said.
“Lot of people do,” I said.
Leonard worked the padlock easy with his tools, and we went inside the yard, closing the gate behind us.
“Bet you the kid lives in that travel trailer, and that’s his workshop out back for the things he sells online,” Leonard said. “Also betcha he doesn’t sell much online. I think that’s just his story so he doesn’t seem like the loser he really is. Grown man living with his mother like that, they always got excuses, usually about how they’re taking care of Mom, but it always seems to be the other way around.”
“You used to live with us,” I said.
“You shut up.”
We pulled on gloves and started at the back door of the house. Leonard cracked the lock quickly, and went inside. It was marginally neat, about the way mine and Brett’s place looks before we clean up for company. The air had a cinnamon smell. There wasn’t much of any great interest, some photos on the wall of her and Scanner. One of them he had a mask of some sort pushed back off his face and it nestled on top of his head. I couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be, but my guess was he had made out of foam or plastic. His face beneath the pushed back mask was young and happy. My heart hurt for him. Once he thought he’d have more to life than a trailer in the backyard, maybe have a Hollywood career making masks and such for horror movies.
In that same photo Jackie had her arm around him and was smiling. She looked pretty good. Thinner then, healthier, less angry. Maybe she had just poisoned her first husband and was happy about it. Around her neck was a necklace with a dangling pendant. It was fairly large and silver with a green stone in the center.
We made our way through all the rooms. Leonard stopped to use the bathroom, and then we slipped out back and locked the door again. We went out to the travel trailer. It had a padlock on the door. Leonard used the lock pick and in a moment he clicked it open.
“I’m getting good at this,” he said.
Inside, the place looked to be more a nest than a home. Clothes were strewn about and the sink was full of dirty dishes and the place smelled like old food and mildewed clothes and too much jacking off.
“Yeah, Scanner lives here,” I said.
“Guys like Scanner always got a story about how they’re going to become something or another, but they aren’t going to get there, and they know it,” Leonard said, flashing the light around.
“What about us?” I said. “We aren’t exactly living high on the hog.”
“It’s a higher hog than we used to live on, rose field work and such.”
“Yep. We’re growing up.”
We went through the travel trailer which took us about two minutes. We searched for another ten or so, found some nudie magazines under Scanner’s mattress.
“I wouldn’t touch those too much,” Leonard said.
I put them back under the mattress. There was a little TV mounted at the foot of Scanner’s bed and a stack of DVDs, all popular movies with lots of explosions and car chases.
We gave the place a bit more of a look, but all we found were some shit-stained underwear on the floor and a drawer full of clean women’s panties.
“Scanner’s head gear,” Leonard said.
We went out and snapped the padlock into place.
“Nothing exciting here.”
Out back we got in the shed easy. That lock might as well have been a piece of thread tied across the door.
There was dust in the place and it was moving about in the flashlight beam. There were tables with oddities on them, pieces of this and that. There were superhero masks and chunks of foam, artificial limbs.
“Okay, he really does make prosthetic limbs and such,” I said. “And they look like they’re pretty good quality.”
“I know you, Hap Collins. You’re thinking if he’d just had the right encouragement he might not have become a sad asshole who lives with his mother.”
“Well…”
“Let me tell you something, he decided on his own to be a sad asshole who lives with his mother. Sometimes there are just assholes, Hap.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
There was a window at the back of the shed and it looked out on a little road that ran up to a fence that bordered the back yard. There was a truck camper on the ground out there. I recognized it. It was the one that had been on the back of the spotted-up truck that night.
I heard a sound at the back of the shed, but when I changed my place and looked where I thought it had come from, I saw nothing. Cat probably. I was getting jumpy.
“Look here,” I said.
Leonard looked out the window at the camper.
“That’s the same camper cover that was on the truck that night,” I said.
“Lot of those out there,” Leonard said. “And they all look alike.”
“That’s it,” I said.
We looked around and found more of the same, and then in a closet we found a set of legs and arms and a torso. Not real ones, but prosthetic ones. There was a foam head with eye holes and a black hood was pulled over it.
“No wonder our man at the graveyard walked funny,” I said.
“Scanner was wearing this shit.” Leonard said.
“Why he looked big and his hands looked small. He had this on to disguise himself, made him look more formidable. With the hood on, gloves and clothes, it being night, I couldn’t tell. I just thought he walked a little funny.”
Leonard pulled one of the legs out and used his hands to bend it at the knee. It bent easy.
“Feel it,” he said.
I took it. It was light as a feather. If Scanner had the whole thing on it would have been a little cumbersome, but I could tell it was easy enough to move around in it if you practiced.
“Okay,” I said, “how do we get it so Marvin can come in here and check things out?”
“I was thinking we set the travel trailer on fire and call Marvin and the fire department.”
“So they put it out?” I said. “Stuff we need is in the shed.”
“Leave it to me.”
Leonard took out a burner cell. We got so we carried one each on us or in our car or pickup.
A moment later the call was made.
“Hey, Marvin. This is Leonard… Of course that Leonard. Listen, there may be a trailer on fire out back of a house on Prichard Lane, 303, and it might need to be put out, but you know, the shed behind it, you might come with the fire department, just in case you might need to snap the lock and look inside to see if anyone’s in there. Fire might spread.”
Leonard listened, then closed the phone.
“Okay. He’s coming in twenty, so let’s find a way to set a fire in the trailer.”
Outside of the shed Leonard put the padlock back in place, and then he picked the lock on the trailer again. Inside, Leonard pulled the curtains over close to the electric cook stove and placed the end of one of them over one of the burners. He filled a frying pan with cooking oil and put it on top of another burner and heated up the grease. I understood then. I got some frozen French fries out of a bag in the refrigerator and poured them in the grease, and we let that heat until the potatoes were popping, then Leonard placed the hot pan on the curtain over the other burner and
turned that burner on. In a moment the curtain caught and the flames ran up the curtain and along the wall. I poured the oil and potatoes from the frying pan onto the stove and the hot burners caught the grease and then the top of the stove was on fire. We went out of there and locked the door. It wasn’t that we thought Scanner would think he forgot and left potatoes on the stove, but it would sure look that way to the fire department at first glance.
“What if it doesn’t catch good?” I said.
“Say some driver drove by, saw smoke and called it in but didn’t want to leave their name. That driver wouldn’t know how bad the fire was, only that smoke was seen. Hell, it might be out by the time the fire department gets here, but they got to go on and take a look, don’t they?”
“They do, indeed.”
Away from the house we walked along the street and glanced back. No smoke was drifting from the backyard. The fire might be out, but it was the excuse Marvin needed. He’d have the fire department break in there and then he’d say he thought he smelled smoke coming from the shed to, and they’d break in there too, or that’s how I figured he’d do it.
In the pickup I took off the work cap and Leonard did too, slipping his fedora in place. I called Marvin on my burner.
When he answered he said he was already in route. I said, “I was you, I’d look close in the shed out back. Fact is, I’d look in a closet there where you’ll find the disguise of the guy that brought us the dog and we gave the money. There might be a camper shell out back like the one the blackmailer was using.”
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