by Shari Hearn
He cringed. “I got a call on my two-way that there was a disturbance down at the Swamp Bar. Two Feds dressed like ladies of the evening.”
“Ladies of the evening?” Gertie asked.
“We wouldn’t know anything about that, Sheriff,” Ida Belle said innocently as a couple of boats sped past them, no doubt filled with bar patrons rushing home. “But the guys in those boats probably do. You might want to go ask them.”
Sheriff Lee looked back at Marge and Gertie and shook his head. “You two are practically begging me to arrest you.”
“Oh, come on, Sheriff,” Ida Belle said smiling. “It’s not what I chose to wear to go fishing, but to each her own.”
“Hmmm,” Sheriff Lee said, rubbing his chin. “Fishing. That’s what you were out doing tonight?”
Ida Belle nodded.
He gestured toward Gertie. “You using dollar bills for bait now? Or were the fish tipping you?”
Gertie folded her arms. “I lost my wallet. I had to put my money somewhere.”
“You decided to stick your money in that skimpy cloth around your... privates? Like I said, you are begging me to arrest you.”
“Aww, Sheriff,” Ida Belle said, “you can’t arrest someone for how they choose to dress or put on their makeup.”
“Heck I can’t, excuse my language. Moral decay might be rampant in other parts of this country and may be something you’ve gotten used to in the jungles of Vietnam, but here in Sinful we aim to protect decency. And that includes the appearance of decency. In fact, Big Eddie’s not even allowed to sell those little chocolate things.” The sheriff snapped his fingers. “What are they called again?”
“Ho-Hos,” Walter said.
“That’s right. Ho-Hos. He can’t sell ‘em because of Sinful City Ordinance Five Zero Two, Section Three, Part One that outlaws anything that even remotely hints at solicitation. Which I don’t really mind because I’m a Twinkies man myself. Big Eddie can’t stock enough of them as far as I’m concerned. You pass that along to your daddy, would you, Walter?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sheriff Lee smiled, as if remembering the last time he’d eaten a Twinkie. “What I like about them is that cream filling in the middle. Now, as a baker yourself,” he said to Gertie, “can you tell me how they get that cream in the middle?”
“No I can’t,” Gertie said. She stood tall and pointed her finger at him. “But what I can tell you is that you’re violating our rights to free expression. That would be covered under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Last time I checked, Sinful is part of America. The America that we three helped fight for.”
“What the heck?” the sheriff asked. He looked at Ida Belle. “What is she talking about?”
Ida Belle started to answer but was interrupted by Gertie. “Just getting something off my chest, that’s all.”
Ida Belle inwardly groaned. The Sheriff raised his brows. “Oh,” he said, “I can clearly see what’s on your chest. I’d say whoever stuck them bills in there could also see that.”
“The man in the moon can see that,” Walter said, snickering.
Gertie stood proudly and looked him in the eye. “It’s a fashion statement.”
Sheriff Lee blew out a breath. “Well, you can make your fashion statement back at the jail. Maybe a night in the clink will make you rethink what kinds of fashion you should wrap yourself in.”
“Jail?” Ida Belle said.
He nodded. “You for driving recklessly on the waterways, Gertie for showing more skin than a baby’s allowed to show, and Marge for being an accessory and violating the no-impersonating-a-clown-except-for-birthday-parties ordinance.”
“You can’t do that,” Marge said.
Gertie and Ida Belle echoed her thoughts in loud protests.
Sheriff Lee quieted them with a shot from his pistol into the water, inches from their boat. “You want to make it two nights?” He pointed to the bills sticking out of Gertie’s crop top. “And I’d get a new wallet if I was you. You’re making our presidents blush.”
WALTER OPENED THE DOOR leading to the jail block and stepped aside so the three women could enter. Gertie shook her head. Marge and Ida Belle stood still and glared at him.
“I refuse to go inside until Sheriff Lee listens to our information relating to the murder of Mr. Guillory,” Gertie said.
“Maybe he would have listened had you not called him a... poop head,” Walter said
Ida Belle laughed. “She didn’t call him a poop head.”
Walter sighed. “You’re right. But I didn’t want to use the word she used in front of ladies.”
“Even though it was a lady who used the word?” Marge asked.
“Just go inside the cell block,” Walter said.
Gertie gave him the finger and stepped through the door.
“What she just said,” Marge added as she followed Gertie.
Ida Belle started to enter, but Walter stopped her. “You’ll still go out with me even though I had to arrest you, won’t you?”
She decided to make him suffer. “I’ll think about it.”
“Oh, come on, Ida Belle. You know I don’t have a say in this. He’s the sheriff. I’m a lowly temporary deputy.”
“If it were me, I’d make Walter beg,” Gertie said.
“Well, it’s not you, so stay out of it.” Walter said. He turned back to Ida Belle and smiled. “If it’ll make you feel any better, the deluxe cell has a new collection of paperbacks.”
The deluxe cell was located around the corner of the cell block and down another hallway. Reserved for women prisoners, it boasted thick mattresses on two bunkbeds, a lamp, two end tables and a small bookcase filled with romance novels. The prevailing thought among Sinful law enforcement was that the female constitution couldn’t take the harsh conditions of a typical cell. Ida Belle, Marge and Gertie had all three been guests in the deluxe cell at one time or another.
“Do we have the cell to ourselves tonight?” Marge asked.
Walter looked down at the ground. “Um, actually, no. You’ll have a roommate.”
Gertie rolled her eyes. “Some gal take a frying pan to her husband? I hate sharing the cell with an angry housewife. All they want to talk about is what a snake she married.”
Walter shook his head. “Nope. No domestic dispute.”
“Who is she? Who’d you arrest?” Marge asked.
Walter sighed and looked into her eyes. “Your Aunt Louanne.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
LOUANNE’S VOICE CALLED out from the women’s cell around the corner. “Present and accounted for.”
The three sped past the men’s cells and turned the corner, rushing down the hall to the large cell where Louanne stretched out on a bunk reading a book.
“Aunt Louanne!” Marge leaned into the bars to the deluxe cell. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, though I could use a refill.” She held up a coffee cup as Walter unlocked the cell door.
“Be a doll and fill this up for me, would you please, Walter?”
“Sure, Miss Louanne.”
He scooted in and took the cup as the three women entered the cell.
“Anyone else want coffee?” Walter asked.
Gertie nodded. “I’ll have mine black with one sugar and a shot of hooch. And if you don’t have any on hand, just ask Sheriff Lee if he can go to his still, which is illegal by the way, and fill up a bottle.”
“I’ll skip the coffee and just take the hooch,” Marge said.
“Marge will have hers with cream,” Ida Belle said. “As for me—”
Walter smiled and cut her off. “One sugar and just a touch of cream. A gentle touch. A touch that teases but doesn’t try to overpower the coffee. Because it can’t. Because the coffee is strong, though once in a while even strong coffee fancies the right, gentle touch.”
Ida Belle felt a flush spreading on her face. The other three women stared at Walter, stunned looks on their faces.<
br />
“Holy cow,” Gertie said, coming out of her shock and holding back a snicker. “We can all leave if you two want some privacy.”
She looked at Marge and they broke out in laughter. Ida Belle cast her steely gaze at them, then turned to Walter. “Skip the coffee. I’ll have water.”
“But no ice,” Marge said to Gertie, a dreamy tone to her voice.
Gertie nodded, and replied breathily, “Room temperature, like the temperature of sweat as it glistens on Ida Belle’s skin.”
“All right already,” Ida Belle said to them, her face growing hotter. “I’m not thirsty. Would you leave, please?”
Walter stepped outside the cell door and locked it. “I’ll be right back.”
Louanne watched him walk away. “He is totally in love with you, Ida Belle. Reminds me a little of Brock Hendrix in this romance I’m reading. Whoever read it before me took the liberty of underlining all the sexy parts.” She put the book down and looked at Gertie, shaking her head. “I don’t have to guess what you were arrested for.”
“I rode Buck at the Swamp Bar.”
“Ahhh,” Louanne said. “Looks like you made out well.”
Gertie pulled the bills from her crop top and counted the money and smiled. “Fifty bucks! You know, if I did this five nights a week I could—”
“Lose your dignity,” Marge said.
Gertie lifted her brows. “Don’t look now, Marge, but your face looks like a gang of first graders attacked you with their crayons. I’d say your dignity is suffering a bit tonight as well.”
Marge wiped at her face. “Hard to clean off when you’re busy running from the law.”
“So what are you all in for?” Louanne asked.
Ida Belle plopped down on the bunk opposite Louanne’s. “Me for speeding on the water, Gertie for indecent exposure and Marge for clown impersonation.”
Marge sat down next to her aunt, concern washing over her smeared face. “You haven’t been arrested for murder, have you?”
Louanne reached out to tuck a wedge of Marge’s teased hair back into place. “No. I was in earlier today to give a statement and I cussed at Deputy Broussard. He arrested me for threatening an officer.”
“He has his nerve,” Gertie said. “You have to obey the law while he plays an illegal game of cards at the Swamp Bar.”
Louanne opened her purse and pulled out a tissue, spit on it, then tried to wipe the makeup off Marge’s face. “Oh, my,” she said, “spit proof. What were you all doing at the Swamp Bar?”
“Gathering intel,” Ida Belle said. “To try to prove it wasn’t you who killed Mr. Guillory because you refuse to let Gabby alibi you.”
Louanne shook her head. “You girls shouldn’t have gone out on a limb for me. The only so-called evidence they have is Buster Bussey said he saw someone who looked like me run from the house and drive away in a convertible. We all know how unreliable he is. My attorney will rip him to shreds.” She glanced at Gertie. “I assume your Granny Magoo hasn’t gone to the sheriff about the woman and the dog.”
Gertie shook her head. “Not until we can find evidence of the woman’s identity.”
“That’s why we went to the Swamp Bar,” Marge said. She filled her aunt in on all they’d learned the past couple of days, including the fact that Deputy Broussard was Bonnie’s new mystery man. Louanne’s face lit up at that.
“Do you think Broussard has a connection to Buster?”
Marge shrugged. “Maybe. I cozied up to Buster and found out a woman paid him to make up a story about what he saw that night, but now that woman wants him to call the sheriff and change his story.”
Louanne glanced at Marge’s jeans and T-shirt. “I hope you didn’t go looking like that.”
Marge shook her head. “No, I brought out the big guns. Pink skirt.”
Louanne smiled. “The pink skirt never lets a spy down. Do you know what Buster was asked to add to his statement?”
Marge shook her head. “Before I could get it out of him, he realized I wasn’t who he thought I was and clammed up.”
Louanne rubbed her chin. “So there’s definitely a woman involved.”
Gertie sat next to Ida Belle. “And a man. Remember, the guy with the baseball cap. My money’s on Bonnie and Broussard.”
“I take it you haven’t found that cap,” Louanne said.
“No,” Gertie said. “But get this, Dolly Harkins gave my Granny Magoo a baseball cap.”
Louanne shrugged. “Dolly is a junk collector. Eventually she gives it all away to whoever will take it. Could be a coincidence.”
“That Dolly’s peculiar,” Marge said. “If you ask me, she found it behind her property.”
“I’d mention it to Sheriff Lee, except my granny would have a conniption,” said Gertie.
Ida Belle threw her hands in the air. “Not that he’d check up on anything we tell him. Every time we tried to tell him about Broussard being in the bar and his connection to Bonnie, he stuck his fingers in his ears and hummed. He said if we spoke to him one more word about Bonnie Cotton, he was going to charge us with interference in a criminal matter.”
“I’m just wondering how Gill fits in to all this,” Gertie said.
“Gill?” Louanne asked.
Gertie filled her in on the underwear with Gill’s initials that Marge had discovered folded in Bonnie’s freshly laundered clothes pile.
Louanne’s brows lifted. “Hmm, that is interesting.”
Marge nodded.
“I’m betting Broussard helped Bonnie kill Guillory,” Ida Belle said. “Gill just seems too much of a marshmallow to kill someone.”
“Even marshmallows can be deadly if they’re driven by passion,” Gertie said.
“Marshmallows?” The man’s voice sounded ancient. They looked over and found Elder Sheriff Lee leaning against the wall outside their cell. “That’s what female prisoners talk about when they get together?”
Elder Sheriff Lee must have been in his 70s by now, Ida Belle figured, having retired as sheriff just after the three of them joined the Army. He was tall and lean and gray, eyes as well as hair. Before they’d left for Vietnam, they’d butted heads with Elder Sheriff more times than she could count. Unfortunately, it seemed his son, Sheriff Robert E. Lee, was aiming to be just as pigheaded, if not more so.
“No,” Ida Belle answered him. “When we get together in a jail cell, unjustly thrown in here I might add, we talk about what we discovered about the murder of Wade Guillory. We’d share this information with the current sheriff, your son, but he said he’d arrest us all over again if we opened our mouths.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re not supposed to be investigating something that doesn’t concern you,” Elder Sheriff said.
Louanne stood from her bunk. “Oh, come on, you ask for the public’s help all the time. Buster Bussey and a couple other witnesses have come forward to tell the sheriff what they saw that night. They’re not in jail.”
“Buster was paid to come forward with a story,” Marge said. “He admitted that to me tonight when he thought I was the woman who’d originally hired him.”
Elder Sheriff Lee’s brow raised as he considered this. “And what would Buster say if my son asked him about it?”
Marge rolled her eyes. “I expect he’d say he never said it.”
“Then it’s just your word against his,” Elder Sheriff Lee responded.
Gertie stormed up to the cell bars and pointed her finger at Elder Sheriff. “And I guess it would be my word against Deputy Broussard’s word if I told you that I saw him tonight in the poker room. Last I remembered, the law took a dim view of gambling.”
“Club room,” Elder Sheriff said. “It’s a club room.”
“It’s a poker room,” Gertie said. “And one of your son’s deputies was in it. The lead deputy on Guillory’s murder investigation. Yet, he would rather keep focused on Louanne Boudreaux for the crime rather than his girlfriend Bonnie Cotton, whose hair clip Marge found at the murder s
cene.”
“It was?”
Walter appeared behind Elder Sheriff, carrying a tray of coffee cups and a glass of water, as well as a vase and a single rose. Elder Sheriff rolled his eyes when he saw it.
“Boy, this ain’t some fancy hotel.”
“A happy prisoner is a cooperative prisoner,” Walter said.
“And a boy handing a lady a single rose in a vase is a prisoner of love,” he said, causing Walter to blush.
“Mrs. Lee brought a bunch of her roses in. I thought they would brighten the ladies’ evening.” Walter looked puzzled at Gertie. “What hair clip are you talking about? I had to catalogue all the crime-scene evidence. I don’t remember seeing anything belonging to Bonnie Cotton.”
Marge glanced at Gertie, then Ida Belle. “I didn’t exactly tell the sheriff I found it.”
“And why not?” Elder Sheriff asked.
Gertie leaned in between the bars, getting as close to Elder Sheriff’s face as she could. “Because Bonnie saw it in Marge’s hand and took it, that’s why. And then acted all nervous.”
Ida Belle stood from the bunk. “I was going to put it back where Marge found it. In retrospect maybe we should have told your son about it.”
“Maybe you should have,” Elder Sheriff said, reaching in his pocket and producing a key. He opened the cell door so Walter could enter with the beverages. As Walter passed by, Elder Sheriff glanced at the tray and lifted his brows. “Does that water have a lemon slice in it?”
Walter blushed again. “Mrs. Lee brought some lemons in from her tree. I thought it would be impolite not to use them.” He presented the glass of water and lemon slice to Ida Belle as the old man watched and shook his head.
Elder Sheriff refocused his attention toward Ida Belle. “I want you to forget about Bonnie Cotton being a suspect.”
“Why?” Gertie asked. “Because Deputy Broussard is dating her? Or didn’t you know that?”
“In fact, I did.”
Ida Belle put her water glass on a side table and charged over to the bars. “So that’s what’s going on. One of the deputies is dating her, so no one will even look at her for this crime.”