DEAD AS a DOORNAIL

by Tonya Kappes

  “That far?” My shoulders slumped. I wished I would’ve let Wally get her now because I didn’t want her to talk my ear off.

  She nodded.

  “I’ve got plenty of time to show you.” She smiled, knowing it was some good gossip.

  “Did you get a lead?” Betty asked. She leaned in. Her face didn’t look so stressed as she craned her neck to listen.

  “Let’s go. But you’re staying in the car.” I warned Tina and jerked my head to the side. “Come on, Duke.”

  Betty flipped him a treat on our way out.

  “Why you going to see Bosco? And is that your dress for Polly’s wedding back there?” Tina yammered on and on before I could even answer one question.

  “It’s not any of your business why I’m going to see him. You’re going to just sit there and not say a word.” I headed on out of town.

  Duke continued to try and push his way up to Tina’s seat.

  “He’s alright, really.” Tina lifted her hand and patted him. She tried to be nice, but after the fifth time she pushed him back. “He just wants to give me some lovin’.”

  “Duke, back.” My voice was a little more forceful and he knew I meant it.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. Duke was sitting on the dress and Poppa was right next to him.

  Tina was right. It was a far piece out to the Frederick house. The only good thing about driving this far was how Mother Nature had painted the landscape with her beautiful foliage. The stone slave walls hugged the road on each side and the leaves were losing their green touches to early signs of vibrant oranges, reds, and golds.

  “How did your visit to the Moose go?” Tina asked, knowing I’d gone there to check on her story.

  “I saw Alma and she claims that she and the Lowells were never good friends. Especially her and Lucy.” The Jeep curved the country road like a glove.

  “She’s lying. At least they were friends until all the cheating occurred,” she protested.

  “Do you know for sure if they cheated?” I asked.

  “Not for sure, but I do know they were friends. Good friends. When I came out here to do the spa day for the women, Lucy Ellen insisted that she pay for it. Which she did. She and Alma did that back-and-forth no-I’ll-pay or at-least-let-me-pay-half conversation until Lucy Ellen finally gave in and let Alma pay for it. Granted, Lucy Ellen bragged on how much money she and Darnell have and I don’t think that sat well with Alma.” Her jaw dropped. “You know what?” she gasped. “It was then that the two started competing for spa treatments. Lucy Ellen did back down to a couple of times a month and then she’d miss appointments or cancel them all together.”

  “When was this again?” I asked.

  “During the summer. I can go back through my calendar at the shop and give you an exact date.” She continued to give me directions by finger pointing to turn here and yonder until we made it.

  The Fredericks’ house sat on a bit of land going east out of town into the deep country. The view was unbelievable.

  “I thought you said they didn’t have as much money as the Lowells?” I knew this was a million-dollar view.

  “I didn’t say that. I said that Lucy Ellen said that to me when she’d come into the spa. If you ask me, I think it was the other way around and Lucy Ellen only bragged to make it look like they had money.” She continued to stare out the window. “I thought you said you talked to Alma this morning.”

  “I did, why?” I asked.

  “Why on earth would she come back here if she was going to spend the day at the Moose?” she asked.

  “Where is she?” I looked out the windshield expecting to see Alma.

  “I guess inside, but that’s her car and Bosco’s truck.” She brought my attention to the two vehicles parked on the side of the house.

  “You stay here.” I looked at her and Duke. “I’ll leave the windows down for air.”

  Poppa walked next to me as we made our way up the front steps of the cabin and onto the covered porch. Being nosy, I walked to the right side of the porch and noticed it wrapped all the way around. Poppa had already disappeared. On my way back to the front door to ring the doorbell, Poppa appeared. His face was faded even more than his normal ghost self.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “Kenni, call for backup. They’re dead.” His words sent a shockwave through me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Betty.” My voice cracked when I spoke into the walkie-talkie, “I...um...”

  “Y’alright, Kenni?” Betty had a habit of stringing her words together.

  I cleared my throat and took a deep breath to gather my wits as I stared at Bosco Frederick lying with his legs half in the house and his torso half out of the house. His was staring toward the sky, his arms cast straight out to his side and a bullet hole right in between his eyes.

  I took a step over him, being careful not to disturb anything.

  “I’m going to need a backup squad at the Frederick home immediately.” I clicked off and rolled the volume of my walkie-talkie down in case there was someone still there.

  I flicked the snap of my holster, drawing out my gun. With my arms at full extension, I looked around, pointing the gun in every direction.

  “Alma?” I called out her name when I noticed she was slumped over the table. “Alma? Sheriff’s office. Come out if anyone is in here!” I screamed a couple of times in different directions.

  The faint sound of sirens echoed through the open door.

  “Sheriff’s office!” I yelled again and stepped over to look at Alma.

  My body stiffened. Her nails were painted Perfectly Posh. But I clearly remembered she wasn’t wearing it earlier today.

  I quickly did a sweep of the house and cleared it before Finn entered.

  “Oh my God.” His chest was heaving up and down. It was so hard for me not to lose myself into the warmth of his arms to let him assure me that everything was going to be okay. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. Alma’s nails are painted Perfectly Posh.” I looked over his shoulder and stared at her. “Are they still wet?”

  From where the light was shining in, the nails were still wet.

  “She’s not been dead long,” I said.

  “Bosco is still warm. I didn’t feel a pulse, but I still called in an ambulance, just in case.” Finn strapped his gun back in his utility belt and I followed suit.

  Both of us worked like finely oiled machines until the EMTs got there. We secured the perimeter of the crime scene. We took photos and marked the gun that was next to Bosco’s hand. It appeared to be a suicide. Only I wasn’t sure how Alma got the polish or where the polish was. It appeared to be missing like it had been at Lucy’s house.

  “Kenni, you better get in here,” Finn hollered for me as I bagged up the gun and the EMTs pronounced both Alma and Bosco dead.

  “What?” I walked into the room they used as an office.

  “Looks like a note was left on his computer.” His gloved hand pointed to the computer screen in Bosco’s office.

  I leaned over to look at the screen.

  “Lucy Ellen and I were having an affair. I’m not proud of myself and have tried to stop it for several months now. Lucy Ellen was going to tell Darnell and even write one of those articles in the Chronicle like she always does. It would be too much for my Alma to take. In fear she’d leave me a lonely old man, I broke into Tiny Tina’s salon.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Finn and sucked in a deep breath before I turned back round to continue reading.

  “I knew exactly what nail polish Lucy Ellen loved because she’d complained about Tina refusing to do her nails. That night I left the camp in the woods and decided to poison the nail polish. I took it to her house that night because I knew Darnell was at the cabin and cleaning it. So I knew he wouldn’t b
e home,” my voice cracked as I read his sickening letter, “and I told her that I’d talked Tina into letting me buy the polish. She still said that she was going to reveal the affair even though I’d given her the polish as a peace offering, and that she was looking forward to typing the words to the Chronicle with her nails painted pink.”

  “This is awful.” Finn shook his head from behind me and ran his hand down his face.

  I swallowed hard and continued, “I left the cyanide at Tina’s salon to plant the evidence. Then I went back to Lucy’s and she’d already painted her nails and had died. I took the polish and put it in my hunting bag to get rid of when I went back to the cabin. This morning while I was in the shower, Alma came home from the Moose, cleaned out my hunting bag, and found the polish. She painted her nails with it since she’d been competing with Lucy Ellen on her spa days. When I got dressed I found Alma dead from the poisonous polish. That’s how I’ve decided to take my own life. I just can’t bear to live without the women I love.”

  “Where’s the polish?” I asked and took the vibrating phone out of my pocket. It was Tom Geary.

  “Still haven’t found it.” Finn hit a few buttons on the keyboard to save the screen and turned the machine off. “I’ll pack up the computer after I print off this note.”

  “I never saw this coming.” I shook my head and put the phone up to my ear. “Hi, Tom. Do you have any information?”

  “There are some disjointed prints on the cap of the cyanide bottle where the ridges of the cap had cut off some of the print. I can tell you that the prints on the fingernail polish aren’t a match.”

  He confirmed that neither Tina’s or Cheree’s prints were on the bottle, making me think they really didn’t have anything to do with Lucy’s murder. “I put the jagged print in the database and there’s nothing that’s coming up.”

  This only made me wonder if Bosco was telling the truth. I’d never heard of Bosco getting in trouble with the law to see if we had fingerprints on file, but that’d be easy enough to find out.

  “Did you send the report over?” I asked.

  “I called you first, but I’ll fax it right now. Anything else I can do for you?” he asked.

  “Get Bosco’s prints over to Tom.” Poppa bounced on his toes. “If he truly did use the cyanide, then his prints would be on it. I arrested Bosco years ago for public intoxication and I fingerprinted him.”

  “I’m going to call over to dispatch and see if Betty Murphy can pull another set of prints and fax them to you.” We clicked off the phone and instead of calling Betty on the walkie-talkie, I decided to call her.

  “Kenni, what’s going on over there?” Betty wanted firsthand knowledge.

  “The Fredericks are dead. It looks like an apparent murder-suicide, but I’m not convinced.” There was just a tug in my gut. “I need you to look up Bosco Frederick and get the fingerprints on file.” I looked at Poppa, who nodded. “If I remember correctly, I do believe he was arrested years ago for public intoxication and he was printed. Can you send those prints to Tom Geary’s lab?”

  “I’ve got it covered.” The phone line went dead.

  “Kenni! Kenni!” A blood-curdling scream came from outside.

  Finn and I took off running out of the cabin.

  “Duke!” Tina yelled from the Jeep. She pointed to the side of the house. “He jumped out and is going nuts over there digging.”

  Duke was going to town with his nose stuck deep in the earth and his paws kicking up the wet dirt behind him.

  “Duke!” I called. He looked up at me with a dumbfounded look on his face, his nose muddy, and his paws covered in it. “Drop it,” I instructed him when I noticed something sticking out of his mouth.

  Finn and I walked over to Duke, where he’d laid down with the item between his two front paws.

  My mouth dried, my heart beat rapidly.

  “The polish.” Shock came out of Finn’s mouth.

  “The murder weapon.” I sighed. “Duke, come.” I patted my hand on my leg for him to come with me to the Jeep to get him away from the polish.

  He darted back to the Wagoneer and took a leap back into the backseat.

  “No!” I yelled, remembering the dress in the back and now his muddy paws were all over it.

  “Don’t worry. Maybe he’ll make it prettier with the mud. It’s so ugly it’d make a freight train take a dirt road.” Tina’s brow furrowed. “My polish. How on earth did it get here?”

  “Bosco left a note saying he was having an affair with Lucy. Lucy Ellen was going to tell everyone about it and he couldn’t let her do it.” I gave her a quick recap of how he was the one who broke into the salon and how Alma got ahold of the polish.

  Tina sat there in shock. Her eyes continued to take big long blinks.

  “She going to be okay?” Finn asked.

  “I think she might be in shock.” I clicked on my walkie-talkie. “Betty,” I called.

  “Yes, Sheriff,” she immediately answered.

  “Can you call Max and tell him he needs to come to the Frederick home to pick up the bodies?”

  “I’ll call him.” Her voice didn’t hold the boisterous tone it had before.

  While I was talking to Betty, Finn walked Tina back to the Wagoneer to sit down and gather her wits and called Wally Lamb to come pick her up. I secured the crime scene and took a lot more photos until I heard Wally pull up. Duke jumped out and lay next to the front tire.

  “It was awful.” Tina took Wally’s cheap hanky out of the pocket of his polyester suit coat—I was sure it came from the local Walmart—and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “Like my daddy would say, I’m tougher than the backend of a shootin’ gallery, but being behind bars about did me in.”

  “Now, now,” Wally consoled her. “We’ll get you home in no time.”

  Wally turned to me.

  “Sheriff, we’re just so happy that you finally brought the killer to justice. At least now that this case is over, my client can get back to her normal life, though a bit embarrassed, and the mayor will be happy because his bride will be happy.” Wally Lamb escorted Tina to his car.

  Wally didn’t waste much time giving me the look. He got in and zoomed down the Fredericks’ driveway, nearly running Max Bogus’s hearse off the road. Duke jogged next to his car, barking the entire time.

  I stood there with Poppa by my side and watched as the hearse swerved and maneuvered back on the driveway.

  “What are you still doing here?” I asked Poppa, who usually quickly disappeared as soon as a case was solved.

  “I fear this isn’t over.” His words were bone-chilling. “I did my normal routine that I’ve always done after we solve a murder, but this time it didn’t work. I walk into the fog and put the murder to rest, then I go around town scaring people away while keeping a close eye on you, but this time when I walked into the fog, it fell around my feet. It was the darnedest thing.”

  I tried to choke down a swallow to help bring some color back to my flushed face before Max got out of the car.

  “Think about this.” Poppa noodled an idea. “That letter from Bosco was written on a computer. Not handwritten and not saved. It was just too much explanation for me to even think it was from a distraught man. So he wrote the letter after he’d just found the love of his life dead, took the nail polish and buried it, all before he shot himself?”

  “Why would he bury the nail polish?” I asked out loud.

  “Good question. I was thinking the same thing.” Finn startled me from behind. “Are you doing that whole talking to yourself thing again?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t help but smile when I saw him. “I can’t shake the notion that this isn’t what it seems. It’s all too perfectly packaged.”

  “And why bury the nail polish?” Finn asked my question.

  Max Bogus got out of the hearse with a l
ook of piss and vinegar.

  “Wally Lamb is crazy.” Max shook his fist. “Did you see that he almost ran me off the road?” Max looked back toward the driveway, but Wally was long gone.

  “I did,” I said and turned to go back into the house.

  “Murder-suicide?” Max asked.

  The three of us took the steps and stopped shy of the door.

  “That’s what I thought when I first showed up. But I’m not so sure the facts will show that.” I knew that Max had an obligation to do autopsies on both bodies since it was the law in Kentucky with a murder-suicide and since Bosco appeared to be Lucy’s killer.

  “I’m not saying Bosco didn’t do it, but I agree with the sheriff. It wasn’t as smooth as he made it seem in that letter,” Finn told Max. He handed Max a piece of paper with the suicide note printed on it.

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to find, but it appears that Bosco came in and found Alma dead from the polish he’d poisoned and killed himself.” Max handed the letter back to Finn. “Only forensics will tell us the truth and that could take a few weeks.”

  We didn’t have a few weeks. Cottonwood was already crazy with next weekend’s wedding and this only added on the stress.

  “Besides the whole cheating thing, which in itself is a huge motive to kill your spouse.” Finn was right. Cheating was the third leading motive in murder cases.

  “Duke.” When I said his name out loud, I remembered how in the car on the way over he’d continued to try and smell Tina’s fingers.

  He jumped up and ran over to me. His tail was wagging so fast. I bent down to pet him. Finn took a treat from his pocket and fed it to Duke. Finn was so thoughtful when it came to Duke.

  “He was acting so odd on our way over here. He was trying to smell Tina’s hands and fingers. I kept pushing him back because I thought he wanted to be scratched. I told him to stay in the Jeep when I got out, but he didn’t. Next thing I know, he’d dug up the nail polish. Why did he want to smell Tina’s fingers? How did he know to dig up the polish?”

  “Maybe he picked up on the scent at the shop when you went to see Tina or he’s been to Tiny Tina’s with you and picked up on the scent there?” Finn questioned.