Sinful Alibi

by Shari Hearn

  “Yes, it was.” Bonnie wrapped her arms around herself as her body shivered. “But I hope to be back in the office tomorrow. I owe that to Mrs. Guillory. Though, to be honest, it doesn’t seem as if she has much time left. She said she was going to go live with her mother.”

  “I hear you were the one who recommended her doctor,” Marge said, marking time until Gertie and Ida Belle showed up in the alley. They were late, having missed a great opportunity to collect the samples while Bonnie fetched Marge some coffee soon after she’d arrived.

  Bonnie nodded. “I never met him, but I heard from a friend in Lafayette that he had helped her brother. Though, to be honest, I think Mrs. Guillory’s beyond hope. Sad, too.” Bonnie took a sip of coffee. “So how can I help you today, Marge? I assume you’re still looking for a place to live.”

  Marge tapped her coffee cup. “I hope that doesn’t seem insensitive of me, what with the tragedy and all.”

  Bonnie waved her off. “No, I understand. Y’all can’t be living with your parents much longer. You need to spread your wings.” She gestured to the piece of paper. “Luckily I brought all the real estate files home in case anyone called about a rental. For the time being, I’m filling in as the manager for the properties until the individual owners can make other arrangements.”

  Bonnie pulled in a deep breath and blew it out. She picked up the sheet of paper from her coffee table. “Here are all the properties that Mr. Guillory managed. You can see there is a two-bedroom on the west side of Sinful.” She pointed to one address on the list. “This is a three-bedroom about a half-hour south of here, along the highway to Mudbug. This particular owner lives in New Orleans, so I’ll show you the property and if you like it, you can connect with him directly. He may accept a three-month lease.”

  Whitey began to bark, bringing Bonnie’s attention to the window. Marge glanced out and saw two older women searching a garbage can across the alley and one house over.

  “Looks like my Granny Boudreaux and Gertie’s Granny Magoo,” Marge said, although the two women were really Gertie and Ida Belle in granny disguises. Marge pointed to the sheet of paper. “This one might do.”

  But Bonnie kept her eye on the alley. “I thought they usually went through stuff on Mondays, just before the trash is collected.” Both grandmothers were fixtures around Sinful, taking great joy in finding that diamond in the rough in people’s trash.

  “I heard my grandma say she wants to mix it up a bit,” Marge said.

  “I don’t know about the one bending over and going through the can, but the other one looks a bit tall to be one of the old gals.”

  Marge was impressed with Bonnie’s observational skills. She’d always thought of Bonnie as a bit vapid. But she was indeed correct. In retrospect, it probably should have been Marge portraying one of the grannies, since she’s shorter. But she won the coin toss, so here she was on distraction detail.

  “My Granny’s been trying to improve her posture,” Marge said as she watched Gertie and Ida Belle walking toward Bonnie’s trash cans. “Maybe standing straighter added some inches on her.”

  “Hmmmm,” Bonnie said, as if considering it. “That Whitey, he sure loves barking at the grannies. I hope they remembered to bring him a dog biscuit.” Bonnie rose from the sofa and walked to the sliding glass door. She sighed as she continued staring outside.

  Chapter Twelve

  GERTIE YANKED THE LID off of Bonnie’s trashcan and stuck her gloved hand inside, pretending to sift through the garbage as Ida Belle stood next to her holding a canvas flour sack.

  Whitey ran over to the fence and barked, while his tail whipped back and forth. Ida Belle reached into the pocket of the granny dress she wore and pulled out a dog biscuit that she fed to Whitey through the chain-link fence.

  “Is Marge giving us the signal to get Whitey’s sample?” Gertie asked.

  Ida Belle glanced over to the sliding glass door in the back of the house. “No. Bonnie’s standing there staring at us.”

  Gertie sighed. “I told Marge to give us a head start before knocking on Bonnie’s door. She got there too early.” After a moment of silence Gertie said, “I feel you glaring at me.”

  “No, I’m shooting you daggers. Marge gave us plenty of time. If you hadn’t stopped at all those trash cans on the way over, we would have timed it perfectly. Bonnie would have been busy greeting Marge and getting her settled.”

  Gertie pulled her head up from the can. “Mrs. Germain threw away a box full of cookie cutters. I couldn’t pass them up. Besides, we have to look legitimate. My Granny Magoo would have never passed up a box of cookie cutters. And you know I couldn’t pass by old man Harley’s place without stopping. Lecherous old coot. The Playboy magazine and bottle of booze I dug out of his trash will come in handy.”

  “Come in handy?” Ida Belle asked.

  Gertie jabbed her thumb in the direction of the house next to Bonnie’s. “Did you forget who lives there? Celia’s family. Until she marries and moves out, Celia’s there as well. Can you imagine how she’ll freak out when she empties the family’s trash next and thinks the booze and Playboy came from her father?” Gertie let out her best cackle.

  Ida Belle shook her head. “We are trained spies. Aren’t we beyond those childish rivalries?”

  “No!” Gertie shot back. “Is Marge giving us the signal now?”

  Ida Belle glanced back at Bonnie’s house. “Not yet. Bonnie’s still watching us.”

  Gertie returned her focus to Bonnie’s trash. “Bottle of blonde hair dye. No surprise there. If we’re lucky, we’ll find some bloody clothes from the crime scene. Why don’t you wave at Bonnie? Maybe she’ll leave us alone if she knows we see her watching.”

  Ida Belle sighed and waved at Bonnie who then returned the wave.

  “She’s still there, watching us. I think if there were some bloody clothes in her trash, she’d be running out here and shooing us away.”

  Gertie pulled a lunch bag out of the trash and opened it. “Ewww.” She closed it. “Well, I see Bonnie cleaned up her yard of Whitey’s poo. This’ll save us a hop over the fence to go find some.” She held out the bag to Ida Belle.

  “What do you want me to do with that?” asked Ida Belle. “You drew the short straw. If you don’t like the outcome of the draw, take it up with Jesus.”

  “Jesus?”

  “I know you prayed before picking your straw. I saw your lips moving. By the way, it’s poor sportsmanship to pray that your friend gets stuck with poop collection. That’s probably why God made you lose.”

  “Fine!” Gertie dropped the paper sack next to the garbage can. “I’ll collect it later.”

  Ida Belle tugged at her granny dress. “These old-lady support hose are cutting off my circulation. If I don’t get out of them soon, they’ll choke off my blood supply and you’ll have to find a rusty tin-can lid in that garbage and amputate.”

  “My pleasure,” Gertie said.

  BONNIE CONTINUED STARING vacantly at the goings-on in the alley. “I never noticed how much they snipe at one another.”

  Marge needed to get Bonnie’s attention back into the room. She spotted a pack of cigarettes on a side table. While Bonnie’s back was turned to her, Marge picked up the pack of cigarettes. Virginia Slims. The same brand as the one she found near the downed tree limbs near the rental.

  Slipping the cigarette pack into her jeans pocket, Marge asked Bonnie if she happened to have a cigarette she could spare. “I’ve been trying to cut down. But with all the excitement, I got hooked again.” Lie. Marge had never taken up smoking.

  Bonnie turned away from the sliding glass door. “Don’t I know it. I’ve been going through pack after pack the last couple of days.” She pointed to the side table. “There should be a pack by the telephone.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t see them,” Marge said, making a show of examining the area.

  “That’s odd.” Bonnie left her spot at the sliding glass door and took a look at the floor beneath the table.
“I guess I must have smoked the entire pack. I have a new carton in my laundry room. Be right back.”

  Once Bonnie disappeared into the kitchen, Marge ran to the sliding glass door, opened it a few inches and stuck her hand out and waved, then rushed into the kitchen in order to further stall Bonnie, who was walking toward the laundry room situated off the kitchen.

  “Nice kitchen,” Marge said, though she really had no idea what would constitute a nice kitchen to most women. A nice kitchen to her would be a table, chairs, refrigerator and food that magically appeared on the table already prepared. Come to think of it, that would be her mother’s kitchen.

  “You think so?” Bonnie said. “I had a hard time deciding on the color scheme, but then I decided avocado will always be in style, so I went with it.”

  Marge nodded as she followed Bonnie into her laundry room. “My mama still has her pink kitchen from the fifties.”

  Bonnie grabbed a small step stool and placed it in front of the dryer. “Oh, yes, Maime Eisenhower Pink, I remember that. My first kitchen was painted in Maime.”

  The step stool allowed her to reach the cupboards above the washer and dryer. While she searched for the carton of cigarettes, Marge noticed a hamper of laundry ready to go in the wash, as well as one that Bonnie had washed earlier, all folded neatly in another basket. And it struck Marge, what if Bonnie had a few bloody items ready to wash? Surely, she would have tended to that yesterday. But blood was tough to wash out. Maybe she was putting the murder clothes through a second or third wash.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Bonnie said as she stepped down from the step stool. “I’m so rattled that I forgot that I left the carton in my garage. Do you mind?” Bonnie opened a door that led to her garage.

  “Not at all,” Marge said. “I’ll just stay here and admire your avocado green washer and dryer. They are beauties.”

  Bonnie touched Marge’s shoulder. “I’ll have these avocado beauties till the day I die.”

  Bonnie closed the door and Marge quickly went through the clothes in the hamper, holding the blouses up against the light from the bulb in the ceiling. There were five total. One appeared to have a stain, but it was small. Marge figured that the amount of blood at the murder scene would probably result in a larger darkened area than that. For all she knew, the small stain could be a grease spot. She turned her attention to the basket of cleaned clothes. A yellow blouse sat folded neatly on top. Marge lifted it up to the light and couldn’t detect any residual stain. She sighed. What was she even doing? Surely Bonnie wouldn’t be stupid enough to keep the bloody murder clothes.

  She folded the blouse and started to return it to the top of the clothes pile when she spotted it.

  For a moment, she stood stunned as she stared at the article of clothing that had been beneath the blouse.

  Marge whistled. A pair of men’s undershorts.

  And monogrammed to boot. Two letters. WG.

  Wade Guillory?

  “THAT’S A GOOD BOY,” Ida Belle said as she clipped a sample of Whitey’s fur. She placed the clump inside a glass tube, capped it and dropped it in the canvas sack. “Okay, let’s head out.”

  Gertie shook her head. “Not until I load up Celia’s trash can with a few goodies.” Gertie rushed to the cans next door and began transferring several items from her canvas bag into Celia’s trash. In went the Playboy and the liquor bottle, as well as a tube of hemorrhoid cream.

  “Would you hurry?” Ida Belle said. “I wasn’t kidding about these support hose. My legs are going to die in about five minutes.”

  “That reminds me...” Gertie pulled out a mannequin’s arm from the canvas bag and cackled. “I wish I could be here when Celia or her mom or dad come out to empty the trash and there’s an arm holding onto a liquor bottle. All that on top of a Playboy magazine.” Gertie laughed. “I guess I could camp out in the alley and keep watch.”

  “Hey, you two old bats get away from our garbage!”

  Ida Belle looked up to find Celia stomping out of her back door and heading their way.

  “I thought I told you two to stay away from my family’s cans! Now, scat or I’ll call the Sheriff!”

  “Is she holding a bat?” Gertie asked.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Ida Belle said. Not that she wouldn’t love to see someone get the better of Celia. But they both had had martial arts training in the Army. She could restrain herself, that was easy. But if Gertie got her ire up and actually let loose on Celia, it would make the gossip circuit within minutes. Besides, her legs were starting to go numb. How did old ladies do it?

  “She would take a bat to my granny?” Gertie asked, indignantly.

  “Now,” Ida Belle urged. “Let’s go now.”

  MARGE HAD JUST STUFFED the men’s underwear in her bra when the door to the garage opened and Bonnie stepped back inside the laundry room, holding a carton of Virginia Slims. “Found ‘em.”

  Bonnie pulled out a pack and began to hand it to Marge when she stopped and frowned. “Did you hear that? Sounds like it’s coming from out back.”

  Marge followed Bonnie through the kitchen and into the living room where Bonnie pointed to the patio door. “You’d better get out there. It looks like Celia’s having words with the grannies again.”

  “What?”

  Bonnie shook her head. “You have no idea what it’s been like, having that awful girl as a neighbor all these years. I’ll be so glad to see her married off and moved into her own damn house.”

  Marge rushed over to the door. Outside, in the next yard, Celia was waving a baseball bat in the air and yelling obscenities. Marge could feel her face heating up. She’d learned over the years to just let Celia’s insults roll off her. But Celia was yelling as if she thought she was yelling at two little old ladies. One of them her grandmother. This she couldn’t let stand.

  Chapter Thirteen

  MARGE OPENED THE DOOR and rushed outside. Ida Belle was holding Gertie back. Celia was planted in the middle of her yard waving the bat.

  “You want to use that thing?” Gertie yelled in her Granny Magoo “old lady” voice. “Come on over here and we’ll see how far you get!”

  “You put that thing down, Celia,” Marge yelled.

  Celia turned toward her. “Where the hell did you come from? You tell your granny to stay out of our trash! It’s undignified and an invasion of privacy!”

  “You know what’s undignified?” Gertie asked. She reached into Celia’s trashcan and held up a magazine. “Your daddy salivating over Miss January!” She opened the magazine and let the foldout centerfold fall open to its three-page length.

  Celia’s mouth dropped. Marge couldn’t help herself. She broke out in laughter.

  “That is not my father’s magazine!” Celia sputtered. “You put that in there, you old goat.” She turned to Marge. “You tell your grandma and her old-as-dirt friend to move along, or else.”

  Marge stopped laughing. She folded her arms and glared at Celia. “Or else, what?”

  “Are you threatening me?” Gertie yelled.

  “Okay, why don’t we all just take a breath,” Ida Belle said, doing a decent job as Granny Boudreaux. “My support hose are killing me. And I do mean that literally. Why don’t we just call it a day?”

  “You know what happens to young ladies who threaten old ladies?” Gertie dropped the magazine and reached into the trash again. She yanked out a liquor bottle and threw it at Celia, then grabbed what looked like an arm from the trash can and waved it in the air.

  What the hell? Marge thought.

  “Need a hand?” Gertie called out, laughing.

  Celia dropped the bat and picked up a hose lying in the yard. Marge sighed. It was time for this party to end. She ran to Bonnie’s gate just as Celia turned on the water.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Marge yelled, joining her two friends who were hauling butt down the alley.

  They ran past several houses and arrived at one without a back fence. Ida Belle pointed t
o the right. “Through here.”

  Marge joined them, making a beeline for the street, where Granny Magoo’s pink Rambler wagon was waiting by the curb. Marge’s own Granny Boudreaux was sitting in the front passenger seat.

  The three scrambled into the back seat. Gertie first, then Ida Belle, then Marge.

  “Go!” Gertie shouted.

  Granny Magoo checked the side view mirror, then slowly pulled away from the curb.

  “My my, we could hear that Celia screaming all the way over here,” Granny Boudreaux said.

  “Maybe it was me having my circulation cut off with your support hose,” Ida Belle said as she quickly removed her shoes and reached under the granny dress she was wearing, yanking off the tortuous garment. She moaned in relief.

  “Do you think maybe you could go a little faster?” Gertie asked her grandmother.

  “Well, we want to be safe,” Granny Magoo said.

  “I know, but this is the getaway car. As in, get away. Not crawl away.”

  “Do I tell you how to go about your daily business, hmmm? Do I?” Granny Magoo asked. She looked at Granny Boudreaux. “Does your little Marge talk to you like that?”

  “Younger generation,” Granny Boudreaux said. “They’ll learn. Someday when they’re in their seventies, they’ll meet some young little smarty pants who will try to tell them how to drive.”

  Granny Boudreaux turned in her seat and shook her head. “Did you bring back something good?”

  Gertie pulled out a handful of cookie cutters from the canvas sack and dropped them into Granny Boudreaux’s outstretched hand.

  “That’s it, huh?”

  “Well, there was an arm from a mannequin, but I didn’t think you’d want that.”

  Granny Boudreaux pouted. “I would have wanted it. It’s not every day you find an arm.”

  “That’s what I was thinking when I stuck it in Celia’s trash,” Gertie said.