murder@maggody.com

by Joan Hess

  “He keeps to himself, unlike that horrible Lazarus, who this very morning, carried his garbage out to the Dumpster dressed in nothing more than his underpants. Eula liked to have fainted, or so she said.”

  “She watched him every step of the way, I suppose?”

  Ruby Bee flipped the burger and put a piece of cheese on it. “There are innocent children living in the trailer park. Someone has to be alert.”

  “And that would be Eula.”

  “The only reason she keeps an eye on her neighbors is to protect the rest of us. Lazarus is up to no good. Eula told me that not only Gwynnie but a lot of other girls were going into his trailer at all hours of the day and night.”

  “Gwynnie?”

  “Among others,” said Ruby Bee as she slapped together my cheeseburger and tossed a bag of potato chips in my direction.

  “Why? What’s he doing?”

  “If Eula knew, she’d have said as much. She’s not a private eye with all kinds of fancy equipment, and she can’t stand at the window all day, due to her varicose veins and tendency toward phlebitis. If you want to know what he’s up to, you should ask him yourself instead of expecting Eula to write up a report and lay it on your desk.”

  I blissed out on the cheeseburger, then said, “He’s most definitely high on my list.”

  “Are you going over there now?”

  I slid off the stool. “No, I’m going over there later.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “I’m going out the door.” Ignoring her questions, I left the barroom and climbed into my car. A sunny Saturday afternoon. Some of the high school boys might be poaching squirrels or lurking outside liquor stores in Farberville, trying to find someone over twenty-one to buy them beer, but I had a good idea where to find the girls.

  The Dairee Dee-Lishus was doing a brisk business in cherry limeades and greasy french fries. The two picnic tables were populated by the usual suspects: Darla Jean, Heather, the Dahlton twin sisters, Billy Dick McNamara, Baxter Bean, and a couple of neckless wonders who were clearly Buchanons. A pair of pimply dweebs had been permitted to hover nearby, but not, of course, too closely to the football players and homecoming princesses.

  They all glazed over like porcelain figurines as I parked and got out of the car. “Pretty day,” I said as I went to the counter. The surly Hispanic guy was even less pleased to see me than the kids.

  “You want something?” he demanded.

  “A limeade, on the rocks,” I said, then turned around to smile at my momentarily captive audience. “Did you all hear about Gwynnie Patchwood?”

  “Shitty thing,” muttered Billy Dick as the rest of them grimaced.

  I put down a dollar and picked up my drink. “Yeah, I guess dying at seventeen is shitty, Billy Dick. Real shitty.”

  “We didn’t really know her,” Heather volunteered. “I mean, she showed up at church, but her aunt and uncle didn’t let her hang around outside after services. She didn’t attend our Sunday school class. Brother Verber most likely would have let her go on the senior trip to Branson.”

  Baxter stopped stuffing fries in his mouth long enough to say, “I thought she was hot, but when I tried to talk to her at the supermarket, she acted like I was dirt.”

  “You are dirt,” said Darla Jean, then looked at me. “My ma made me call her a couple of weeks ago and ask her to go riding around or whatever it is my ma thinks we do on the weekend. Gwynnie made it clear that she was way too ‘mature’ to hang out with the likes of us. I didn’t bother to argue with her, but Baxter’s got a bastard son over in Starley City, and just last week Carlotta …”

  “Darla Jean,” Carlotta inserted icily, “we agreed not to discuss this. One more word and I’ll start remembering what happened at the mall just before Christmas.”

  “I was not shoplifting!”

  “Walking out of the store in three pairs of jeans and four blouses?”

  I held up my hands. “I’m here to talk about Gwynnie. Seventeen, and dead. Her body’s on the way to the state lab in Little Rock. Once she’s there, she’ll be laid flat on a metal table. The first incision will be from her chin to her pubic bone. The medical examiner will crack open her rib cage and remove her organs. Anybody want to make a joke?”

  Nobody did.

  I pointed at Darla Jean and Heather. “In my car, now. We need to talk.”

  “Why do you always pick on me?” asked Darla Jean as she stood up. “I already said I don’t know anything. Last time you made me go for a ride, Billy Dick here accused me of being a snitch.”

  “If Billy Dick repeats that accusation, I’ll jerk out his tonsils and feed them to the turtles,” I said levelly. “That goes for the rest of you. A seventeen-year-old girl was murdered last night. She will not be buying a dress for the prom, or skinny-dipping in Boone Creek when the weather gets warmer. She will not be sitting on a blanket sipping cheap wine on a starry night. She won’t be going off to college or finding a job in Farberville or hitchhiking to California or getting married—or turning eighteen. I assume you can figure out exactly what she will be doing two months from now.”

  Heather and Darla Jean got into the backseat of my car. I gave the Hispanic guy an apologetic smile as I drove away; having customers hijacked was hardly good for business. I drove to the north end of town and parked by the remains of Purtle’s Esso.

  “I sold ads for the yearbook,” I said, twisting around in the seat to look at them. “Thing is, I sold them in the fall. The deadline was December first.”

  Darla Jean chewed on this for a moment. “Maybe back then it was.”

  “Yeah,” Heather added earnestly. “Everything’s computerized these days. We can sell ads right up until the page proofs go to the printer.”

  “And the yearbook sponsor will confirm this?” I asked.

  Squirm city.

  Darla Jean made an admirable try. “That’d be Mr. Kennismith, but he’s just doing it because Miz Bealford quit last month and Mr. Darker dumped it on him. He doesn’t know how it works.”

  “I do.”

  Heather pushed her hair out of her eyes. “What’re you gettin’ at?”

  I managed a faint smile. “Let’s go find a log and sit beside the creek. This may take a while, but at some point you’ll have to tell me what’s been going on.”

  “Nothing’s been going on,” Darla Jean said defiantly, eyeballing Heather. “Nothing at all. We may have missed the deadline for yearbook ads, but that ain’t a crime. Maybe we thought he’d pay in cash and we could pocket it. It’s not like he was gonna demand a free copy two months from now. Isn’t that right, Heather?”

  “Out of the car,” I said.

  “You’re kidnapping us,” said Heather.

  I gazed coldly at them. “Don’t make me shoot you and bury your bodies under the bridge.”

  “You know,” Darla Jean whined as she and Heather followed me down to the creek, “just because we’re minors doesn’t mean we don’t have the same rights as everybody else.”

  Gesturing at a relatively dry log, I said, “Would you prefer that we went by your homes and informed your parents that I was taking you to the sheriff’s office for interrogation? They’d have at least half an hour to arrange for lawyers to meet us at the jail in Farberville.”

  “What’s your problem?” Heather demanded as she took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and handed it to Darla Jean. “Nobody hung out with Gwynnie. She couldn’t have found the Dairee Dee-Lishus on a bet. Maybe we saw her around town, but that’s all. Shouldn’t you be talking to Jessie Traylor?”

  “Or Justin Bailey?” added Darla Jean.

  I sat down across from them. “Either of you heard anything more than gossip?”

  Darla Jean avoided my eyes as she lit a cigarette. “I s’pose not. Can we go now? My ma says I have to finish the ironing if I want to go out tonight. Billy Dick and me are aimin’ to go to a movie.”

  Heather stiffened. “I thought you and him broke up last wee
kend.”

  “We did, but then on Tuesday he left a real sweet note in my locker, and on Wednesday we—”

  “Okay,” I said hastily. “I’m sure everybody in town will be relieved to know the two of you have reconciled.”

  Darla Jean choked on a lungful of smoke: “We’ve never done no such thing! My pa’d whip me if he heard something like that. We may have gone out to Boone Creek last night, but we sure didn’t reconcile, or whatever you’re calling it. We’re not even going steady!”

  “Easy,” I murmured.

  “Well, we didn’t!”

  I bit my lip for a moment. “Let’s go back to yearbook ads and Lazarus. What were you really doing there? Hoping to buy drugs?”

  Heather stared at me, and if her fingernails had not been digging into her thighs, I might have bought her reply. “No way! He’s so creepy he ought should be living in a swamp. Darla Jean and me just wanted to get a closer look at him.”

  “What if I said I had a witness who’s seen you two going into the trailer on several occasions? Do you know how easy it’s going to be for me to get a search warrant?”

  This shut them up for a good minute. Heather finally flicked her cigarette into the water and said, “You’re planning to search his trailer?”

  Darla Jean groaned. “I’m gonna throw up.”

  I helped her to her feet and aimed her toward the brush behind us. When she finally trudged back to join us, I had great expectations that they would proceed to blurt out their innermost secrets and throw themselves on my mercy.

  “I wanna go home,” wailed Darla Jean. “I got a belly-ache.”

  Heather jumped up off the log. “I can’t believe you’re being so mean, Arly. You might as well be swimming out there with the water moccasins. Darla Jean, do you think another cigarette might settle your stomach?”

  “I wanna go home!” She staggered back to the brush and made more disgusting noises. “Help me to the car, Heather. I reckon I’m about to pass out.”

  “Either of you enrolled in drama this year?” I asked as we scrambled up the slope.

  “That is so rude,” Heather said with a sniff of adolescent indignation. “Lazarus was not selling drugs. I swear it. Help me get Darla Jean in the car before she pukes all over both of us.”

  I opened the back door and stepped back as Heather coldheartedly shoved her friend onto the seat: Darla Jean’s face was the same greenish hue as the bubbly scum in the creek, and her cheeks were inflating ominously. Heather found it prudent to sit in the front seat across from me.

  “Is she pregnant?” I asked quietly as I started the car.

  Heather shook her head. “No, she asked me for a tampon earlier this afternoon. You just got her all upset, accusing us of buying drugs from Lazarus.”

  “You just swore he’s not selling drugs,” I pointed out.

  Her chin shot out. “As far as I know, he’s not selling drugs. If you want to get a Bible, I’ll put my hand on it and say as much. I don’t know anybody that’s bought drugs from him.”

  “What is he doing?”

  “You’ll have to ask him yourself. Maybe he’s snatching up those nasty little brats at the Pot O’ Gold and grinding their bones to make his bread.”

  Darla Jean promptly did a number in the backseat. Heather and I mutely rolled down our windows.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “Darla Jean’ll kill me if anybody catches sight of her like this.”

  “Shall I take her home?”

  “So her parents can kill her?”

  I braked for the stoplight, which always turned red when it sensed my approach. “I’ll drop you off at the Dairee Dee-Lishus so you can get your car, then I’ll take Darla Jean back to my apartment. She can take a shower and borrow some clothes. Afterward, you can drive her home.”

  Heather looked at me out of the corners of her eyes. “You’re going to do that, even though you still think we’re lying to you?”

  “Yeah, I am—and, yeah, I do.”

  “Because we’ll be so grateful that we’ll tell you the truth?”

  “That would be nice, but that’s not why I’m doing it, Heather. Consider it a legacy from Gwynnie.”

  The other teenagers had cleared out from the picnic area. The Hispanic guy would no doubt have knocked me upside the head with a tamale if I’d given him half a chance, but I merely let Heather out of my car and drove to my apartment. It may have lacked a view of skyscrapers and the East River, but it had decent water pressure.

  Darla Jean was going to need it.

  As for everything else, screw it. The day had gone on too long, caused me too much pain, confused and bewildered me, obliged me to be rude, pricked too many nerves. Once Heather hauled away Darla Jean, I intended to clean up the backseat of the car, open a beer, heat up a can of soup, and stare at the TV set.

  At some point, I might even turn it on.

  “You know what riles me?” Raz demanded, stomping back and forth in his living room. “They’re all saying my ’shine is what killed that girl in the shack. Can you imagine such a thing?”

  Marjorie couldn’t.

  “My ’shine is pure as mother’s milk. Ain’t nobody ever gone blind from drinking it. You seen how I use only the finest corn mash, and my pa hisself welded ever’ seam of the copper cooker. Now if I was makin’ rotgut like that ol’ boy over in Maducca County, running it through a car radiator and adding wood-grain alcohol, I’d be the first to say so. Ain’t no one ever died from drinking my ’shine in forty years. You recollect when that biker at the pool hall bet fifty dollars he could down a whole quart jar and walk out the door? He was mighty wobbly, but he made it. I still feel badly about him driving into a tree, but you cain’t go blaming me on account it bein’ foggy.”

  There was no hint of accusation in Marjorie’s gaze.

  Raz wheeled around. “It’s all that sumbitch Diesel’s fault. Iff’n he hadn’t gone and stole my stash, I never would’ve been obliged to mention it to Arly. The ridge is plenty big for the two of us, long as he keeps his distance. But then he ups and steals my ’shine! I oughtta track him down like a rabid dawg and put a bullet between his eyes. I reckon I’d git a medal like a war hero.”

  Marjorie blinked in awe.

  “That’s right! Why, Jim Bob hisself would pin the medal on my overalls while the high school band played the national anthem. Ever’body would get all misty, excepting maybe Petrol, but who gives a sorry shit about him!”

  Marjorie slithered off the couch and lumbered into the kitchen to bury her glistening pink snout in a bowl of kibble. It was hard to say what she was thinkin’.

  Raz, on the other hand, was intent on vengeance.

  Chapel sat on the sofa with the remote control in her hand.

  “I can’t believe there’s no cable,” she said. “They have cable in Latvia and Estonia. They get CNN in Nepal.”

  “You want to go to a movie in Farberville?” asked Justin, admittedly without much enthusiasm. Fishing had involved more than dangling a rod over the water and waiting for some mindless piscine to impale itself on the hook. They’d careened down a practically nonexistent road, and then hiked for most of a mile, weighted down with rods, reels, creels, a couple of coolers, and a picnic basket filled with sandwiches and cookies, struggling through endless patches of poison ivy and briars. He’d twisted his ankle, bumped his head on a branch, and taken a hard fall in the mud beside the river. Mosquitoes had attacked his exposed flesh, and clouds of gnats had surrounded his head, determined to take up residence in his nose and mouth. He’d been picking off seed ticks in the shower when he’d been interrupted.

  “You look a little worn,” she said. “I bought some wine after I finished up at the library. You want some?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You heard about Gwynnie?”

  “I heard she was missing. They find her?”

  Justin repeated what he’d been told, as well as what he’d learned when he’d gone to the supermarket to buy calamin
e lotion and sunburn ointment (neither of which thus far had offered any relief). “Her body was discovered in a shack somewhere up on that ridge on the west side of town, but the buzz is that she was killed at the Flamingo Motel.”

  Chapel filled two plastic glasses with wine and sat down next to him. “Gawd, I feel terrible. The chief of police came by this morning to say Gwynnie had disappeared. I shrugged it off.”

  He took a swallow of wine. It was not full-bodied or frisky or fruity or smoky, but it went down as well as any wine could that came with a screw cap and cost less than five dollars a gallon. “Arly seems to think I might have been fooling around with Gwynnie.”

  “It’s occurred to me.”

  “Well, you’re both wrong. She was a pathetic little thing. I dealt with her as I would any particularly tire-some student.”

  “When was she killed?”

  “Sometime after the class last night, when I was in Farberville.”

  Chapel put down her glass. “Will LaRue confirm that you were at his house?”

  “He wasn’t home,” Justin said. “Earlier this afternoon I reread the E-mail he sent, just to make sure he was talking about last night. I realize that at times I get confused about dates, but this wasn’t one of them.”

  “Did you call him today to ask where the hell he was?”

  “He didn’t answer, but he usually takes his laundry over to his mother’s house on Saturday afternoons and hangs around until she feeds him dinner. Eventually, if he stays long enough, she breaks down and gives him the leftovers.”

  Chapel tried not to sigh. “You’d better print out the E-mail and save it.”

  “You’re acting like you don’t believe me either.”

  “There’s more than one buzz at the supermarket,” she said coolly as she picked up the remote and turned on the local news. Gwynnie Patchwood’s murder was the lead story.

  “I heard tell this is fake,” Kevin said, watching the screen as the two hairless men bounced off the ropes, waving their arms and belly-bumping each other with sadistic glee. “They git together aforehand and decide which of ’em is gonna do what to the other.”

  Earl stared at Kevin from the recliner. “Son, there are days I still think I can whup some sense into you, but they’re getting further and further between. Are you saying that Rocky Horror and Blondo here aren’t really slamming each other’s faces on the mat? Did you see Blondo’s foot stomp down on Rocky Horror’s back just now? How’s anybody gonna fake something like that? I know for a fact there are paramedics waiting just in case they have to take someone to the emergency room. Why’d they be doing that if this was faked?”