Stay At Home Dad 03-Father Knows Death

by Jeffrey Allen

  “You keep using that word.”

  She glanced around me before settling her eyes on mine. “I heard that she was having an affair with George.”

  3

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Matilda??”

  Susan nodded her head, her hairspray-drenched curls bobbing obediently. “Yes. She and George. Together. Everyone is talking about it.”

  I was pretty sure the only person talking about it was Susan. And if other people were talking about it, it was because of her.

  “Hmm. That is . . . interesting.”

  She waited for me to ask questions. I didn’t.

  “Don’t you want to know what’s going on?” she asked. “Maybe something happened between them. Maybe she was the one who put him in the freezer. I thought you were an ‘investigator. ’”

  “I am. But I’m not working this case.” Or any case at the moment, which was pretty much fine with me.

  “You might want to, after you hear about Matilda.”

  She wasn’t gonna stop, so I gave in. “Fine. What makes you think they were having an affair?”

  Susan pulled me away from the food stand, toward the arts and crafts building. I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if people were crowding around, gawking at the crime scene. George’s body had been removed and most of the police cars were gone. One car was still parked next to the building, a dark blue unmarked sedan. The detective working the case.

  Susan stopped just short of the entrance to the arts and crafts building and pulled me next to the wall.

  “I saw them,” she whispered. “Together.”

  I flinched. I wasn’t so sure I wanted more details about four-hundred-pound Matilda and her supposed lover. There were some things the mind refused to forget.

  “At Texas Roadhouse,” she continued, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “You saw them at dinner?” I said. “I’m sure they were friends, Susan. George was the groundskeeper here for years. They could’ve been discussing fair stuff.”

  George Spellman had operated a small lawn service business in Rose Petal. He also moonlighted as the groundskeeper at the Carriveau County fairgrounds during the summer.

  Susan shook her head. “No. This was not a business dinner. I promise you. They weren’t discussing grass or repairs or whatever else it was he did around here.”

  I’ll admit, I was becoming a bit more curious. “How do you know? And I thought you said you heard they were having an affair? Who told you that?”

  “Oh, everyone is talking, trust me,” she said, her fingernails digging into my forearm. “But there were tears. She was crying. She was clutching his arm. I think . . . I think he might have been leaving her. Ending the relationship.”

  This was a woman who watched far too many soap operas.

  “You know, people might say the same thing about me and you,” I said.

  Her mouth formed a perfect O. “Oh?”

  I glanced at my arm. “You just pulled me away from a crowd. You’re whispering into my ear. Clutching my arm. . . .”

  She dropped my arm like it was a stick crawling with fire ants.

  “Deuce Winters! I am insulted!” She stepped away, the picture of indignation. “That is not what this is about!”

  “Just sayin’.” I tried not to laugh. “Look, I gotta go find my wife. Make sure she doesn’t hear any rumors about me and you.”

  I briefly turned back to see Susan glaring after me as I walked away.

  Julianne and Carly were in the animal barn along with a sea of other fairgoers. It wasn’t air-conditioned, but there were fans circulating the hot air, at least giving the impression that people were being cooled off.

  “Is the viper gone?” Julianne sat perched on a tiny chair, her stomach ballooning in front of her. I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get up.

  “Yeah, she’s gone.”

  “Daddy, look at this bunny!” Carly sat across from Julianne, the biggest rabbit I’d ever seen huddled in her lap.

  “Are you sure that isn’t a bear?” I asked. I stroked the rabbit’s silky ears.

  “I want him,” she told me. “He’s for sale. The sign on the cage says so. He’s only ten dollars!”

  “And he probably eats ten dollars’ worth of food a day,” I said.

  “Daddy,” Carly said, scolding me. “He’s not that big.” She stood to return the rabbit to its cage. It struggled and scratched the air as she hoisted it up on her shoulder. An older 4-H’er, a girl I didn’t know, lurked by the baby pigs.

  “Hey,” I said, motioning to the girl. “Any chance you can help her get this bunny back in its cage?”

  The girl tugged nervously at her braid. “Uh, I don’t work with the rabbits.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She cringed, her eyes wide. “They . . . uh . . . they kinda scare me.”

  “But you’re working in the animal barn.”

  “My mom signed me up. I didn’t want to work in here.”

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes and scooped the massive rabbit from Carly’s arms. Its claws dug into my arms as I struggled with the latch on the cage. I could hear Julianne stifle a giggle as I crammed the bunny back into its cage.

  “Wow. What a rabbit wrangler you are,” she said.

  I glared at her. “You have no idea.”

  “So, what else did Susan have to say?” Julianne asked.

  I stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. “The usual. Just some rumors about the dead guy.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  “That he and Matilda Biggs were having an affair.”

  Julianne whipped her head around to look at me. “Are you serious?”

  “Serious that she said that? Yes. Serious that he was? Good God, I hope not. But she seemed . . . off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Something just didn’t seem right. She was upset about the death and about the food stand being messed up, but there was something I couldn’t put my finger on. And it was the same thing with Matilda. They were worried about things other than the fact that someone was murdered.”

  “Deuce.” Her voice was filled with warning.

  “What?” I dug my fingers into the soft flesh of her shoulders and kneaded gently.

  “Do not get involved in this.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  She pushed on the seat of the chair, trying to heave herself to a standing position. I grabbed her under the shoulders and helped.

  “I mean it,” she said, her eyes narrowed. “I am a hundred weeks pregnant. I am about to have a baby. I have a legal practice that needs all of my time and then some. Do not get involved.”

  I held her to me. “Okay, okay.” I kissed the top of her head.

  She pushed me away. “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “I will kill both you and Victor,” she said. “And that’s not a euphemism for just being irritated and slapping you upside the head or something. I will honestly kill you both and find a way to get rid of the bodies so that no one will know I did it. I won’t use a freezer. I will dig deep, deep graves way out in the country and no one will ever find either of you.”

  “You really need to have this baby,” I said. “You make far fewer death threats when there isn’t a child inside you.”

  She stepped back and placed her hands on her hips. “If someone told me that killing you would get this baby out of me, I’d truly start looking for bullets. It would be hard raising two kids as a single parent. But right now, I’m willing to give it a shot to get this thing out of me.”

  Ah, motherhood.

  4

  Julianne took Carly over to the games and rides on the midway and I wandered back to the food stand just in time to see a large, yellow rental truck backing up toward the building. A toothpick-thin guy in a long red wig with horns poking from it and aviator shades guided the truck backward. A cigare
tte dangled from his lips as he waved a lazy hand at the building, then held it up to signal the truck to stop.

  The driver’s door swung open and a woman in her seventies hopped out. A tight Afro of gray curls sat on top of her head and thick, black, cat-eye-shaped glasses framed big brown eyes. She wore jeans with an elastic waist along with a Carriveau County Fair T-shirt and white running shoes.

  She scowled at the guy in the red wig. “Dang it, Bruce! Get outta the way!”

  A befuddled Bruce held his hands out, wondering exactly what he was in the way of. She pushed past him and unlocked the latch on the back of the truck, sending the door up on its tracks. “Now get this out of here, pronto!”

  Bruce’s shoulders slumped and he pulled out the ramp in the truck. “Yes, Mama.”

  Mama yanked her walkie-talkie from her hip and muttered into it. She glanced around waiting for a reply when she spotted me and headed in my direction.

  “I been wantin’ to meet you,” she said, squinting at me. “You’re the Winters boy, aren’t you?”

  Boy? “I’m Deuce, yes.”

  She held out a bony hand. “I’m Mama Biggs. Chairwoman of the fair board. I run the show around here. Your daddy used to work for the bank, right?”

  So this was Matilda’s mother. And that made Bruce Matilda’s brother. I looked at the thin guy in the red wig and couldn’t believe two people of such opposite builds could come from the same gene pool. I shook her hand and it was stronger than I expected. “Pleasure. And, yes, he did.”

  “That’s what I thought.” She gestured at the truck. “New freezer. On account of George bein’ dead in the other one.”

  “Right.”

  Bruce backed up slowly with the freezer up on a dolly. It was identical to the other—stainless steel, upright, double doors with a massive handle—and could hold a ton of meat, along with the body of an adult male.

  “Now that all that yellow tape is gone, we can get back to business,” Mama said. She eyed me. “Matilda said you were the one that found him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I ain’t never seen a dead body before,” she said. “Was he tough to get outta the freezer?”

  “Uh, I didn’t try to take him out. Generally, you don’t want to disturb the victim before the authorities get to the scene.”

  The walkie-talkie crackled and someone said something about mini-donuts.

  Mama rolled her eyes and held the walkie-talkie up to her mouth. “You tell Eugene that Mama says he either keeps the mini-donut shack open until midnight or I’ll come push him in the deep fryer myself.”

  “Roger that, Mama,” the voice said.

  She shook her head. “Every year, that dummy wants to close up early. I need a new donut guy.” She eyed me. “You do donuts?”

  “Make them? No. I just eat them.”

  “Shame,” she said, pulling up on her jeans. “All right, listen. You’re one of them private detectives, right?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “And you got that midget as a partner? The bald one that sorta freaks everyone out?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “All right, then,” she said as if I wasn’t even there. “I’m gonna need you to figure out what happened with George. But you’re gonna need to keep it quiet. You report only to me. I don’t want no jabberin’ about it to anyone.”

  Bruce was struggling under the weight of the freezer, his steps wobbly and unsure as he backed down the ramp.

  “Bruce, I swear to the good Lord,” she yelled. “If you drop my new freezer, yours’ll be the next dead body they find! And they won’t have to look for it in a freezer!”

  “Yes, Mama,” he groaned as he struggled to get it off the ramp.

  “Now, I don’t know what you charge,” Mama said to me. “But the fair board will be happy to pay a reasonable fee. Nothing ridiculous and if you try to scam me, I’ll find out and then you’ll be in for it.”

  “Ma’am, I can’t . . . ,” I said.

  “It’s Mama, not ma’am,” she barked at me. “Ma’am was my grandmother. So you just figure out what happened to old George and you let me know.”

  “I think the police are handling it.”

  She rolled her eyes again. “Oh, well, isn’t that peachy? We oughta know something right around never, then, right? Those clowns couldn’t find a hot dog if you gave ’em the bun and the ketchup!”

  Bruce finally made it off the ramp and Mama stomped over to it, picked it up, and slid it back into the base of the truck. She reached up and pulled the cord on the truck door and slammed it down, locking up the hitch.

  She pointed at me as she yanked open the driver’s door. “Only me, Deuce Winters. You don’t talk to no one else. Not that dim-witted son of mine, Bruce, not Matilda, not another soul.” She turned on the engine and the truck roared to life. She scowled at me. “You hear me?”

  Mama Biggs was already pulling away before I could even try to answer.

  5

  I stepped over to where Bruce was struggling with the freezer and helped him balance it on the dolly before he was squashed beneath it.

  “Thanks, man,” he said, the cigarette bobbing in his mouth. “This sucker’s heavy.”

  I helped him maneuver it so that it was up against the back wall of the food stand’s kitchen. We lowered it down easily and Bruce slipped the dolly out from under it, wiping streams of sweat off his face.

  “Guess that’s as good a place as any,” he said, staring at it.

  “Good enough,” I said. “As long as the cord reaches the outlet, we can get to it right there.”

  “You workin’ in there today?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Score me a hot dog or somethin’?”

  “We don’t get free food. Sorry.”

  He frowned and I got the distinct impression he thought I was an idiot.

  “Can I ask why you’re wearing a wig?” I asked.

  He grinned, exposing yellowed teeth. “It’s tradition.”

  “Tradition?”

  “Every year, I wear it,” he explained. “I had too many beers one year and put it on and wore it. Just took off. It’s kinda become a thing. Plus, everyone knows who I am. Kinda hard to miss it.”

  “I’ll say. Are you on the fair board, too?”

  He nodded. “Yep.” He leaned against the freezer. “That’s why I’m doing all the heavy lifting.” He dissolved into laughter at his own joke.

  “You know George?” I asked.

  His laughter died out and he stared at me. “Why?”

  “Just asking.”

  “You heard something?”

  “No, I was just curious.”

  “Hmm. Right.” He shrugged. “Sure I knew him. Everyone knew him. He was always around here.” His mouth twitched. “But we weren’t like buddies or anything, all right? I mean, like, I’d wave at him and say what’s up, but not like we went drinkin’ together or anything like that.” He shook his head.

  I started to respond, but he wasn’t finished. “So maybe I didn’t really know him. I shouldn’t say that. I was aware of him. Yeah. That sounds better.”

  I was almost sorry I’d asked the question. “Okay. Got it.”

  “You hear anything different from anyone, you correct them, all right?” he asked, craning his neck at me.

  “Sure. Yeah.” What an odd request, I thought.

  He seemed satisfied with that answer. “All right, then. I’m gonna go get me a beer over at the garden. Board members drink free over there.” He grinned. “I’d invite ya, but I guess you gotta get back to cooking hamburgers or something.”

  I nodded and headed for the stand. Anything was better than spending another moment talking to Bruce.

  Leon Cotter was standing near the back of the stand, chewing on a toothpick and adjusting his Rose Petal Sheriff’s Department hat on his flat, wide head.

  He nodded at me. “Deuce.”

  “Sheriff,” I said. “Busy morning, eh?” />
  The toothpick shifted from the left side of his mouth to the right. “Could say that.”

  Leon had just stepped into the sheriff’s role in town and no one really knew how to take him. He was quiet and tended to keep to himself. Tall and lanky with a ruddy complexion, he was completely bald beneath the hat. He wasn’t seen out and about very often and, given that Rose Petal didn’t have a whole lot of crime, that was okay.

  “You thinking about looking into Mr. Spellman’s death?” he asked, casting a sideways glance at me.

  “I don’t think so, no,” I said, unsure of how to answer after my meet-up with Mama Biggs.

  “Good,” he said, nodding. “We probably won’t get the ball rolling on this until the fair ends.”

  “Really?”

  “We don’t want anything getting in the way of the fair,” he said. “It’ll be fine. He’ll still be dead.”

  “But don’t you think letting the investigation sit still might put you at a disadvantage?” I asked. “I’d think you’d want to act quickly.”

  “Which is why I’m the sheriff and you’re not,” he said, half a grin settling on his mouth. “This fair is the most important thing in town. We’ll preserve evidence. We’ll begin the preliminaries. But the biggest crime would be letting something like this overshadow the entire fair week.”

  The fair might have brought in a lot of money for Rose Petal and community organizations, but I couldn’t have disagreed more. Letting a crime investigation sit idle seemed criminal in and of itself. If Victor had taught me anything, it was that once you found a trail of evidence, you didn’t let it grow cold. Letting George Spellman’s death go unlooked at for several days almost assured that the trail wouldn’t just go cold. It would ice over.

  “So if you do decide to do some of your own investigating or whatever it is you and that short fella do, I’d appreciate it if you two wait until the fair is over,” he said. He tipped his hat in my direction. “And I’d be mighty appreciative if I didn’t have to tell you a second time.”

  6

  The stand was busier than before the discovery of George’s body, a combination of hungry people and curious onlookers. Pete and I couldn’t keep enough meat on the grill, as the orders came fast and furious. When our relief showed up, I had to double-check my watch to make sure the four-hour shift was over.