by C. L. Bevill
So on this Saturday Melvin was looking at the engine of the truck, tapping his fingers along the radiator, wondering if it were too late in his life to consider a career change. Being an astronaut was probably out, but he thought he could definitely try the amazing and fun career of a rodeo clown. He was picturing the clown make-up on his face when a blue minivan pulled up outside the open bay doors. The minivan was brand sparkling new and obviously not in need of Melvin’s services. The driver was Tee Gearheart. The passengers were Bubba Snoddy, Mike Holmgreen, and Precious the dog, who was sitting in the child’s carrier strapped to the rear passenger seat.
Melvin brightened. Bubba was a genius when it came to rooting out a problem with a vehicle. And here Bubba was, to save the day, or to save Melvin from his true calling.
All three men got out of the minivan. Precious barked annoyedly in the back of the minivan because they quickly closed her in, with two windows cracked. Bubba had handcuffs on. Mike was sniffing the outside air like a dog that hadn’t been out of the kennel for a long, long time. Tee was looking grimly determined. Melvin, who didn’t think of himself as looking anything in particular, got a rag to wipe off nonexistent grease from his hands while he waited for the three to approach.
“Say, Melvin,” Tee said. He stepped up next to Melvin and towered over the other man.
“Say, Tee,” Melvin said back. He adjusted his glasses and glanced warily at Bubba. “Bubba. You outta jail already?”
Bubba raised his handcuffed wrists. “Not exactly. You know Mike Holmgreen?”
“Hey, Mike,” Melvin said. “Pegramville’s own little arsonist. Why ain’t you got cuffs on, too?”
Mike grinned. “I’m not a flight risk.”
“Melvin,” Bubba said peremptorily. “You said you got offered a job at the Wal-Mart up the way.”
“Yeah,” Melvin said, shrugging. “You want to take a look at Mr. McGee’s truck, Bubba. I ain’t got a clue why it’s making that clanking sound. The last time I started it, it sounded like it was the bathroom at the Pegramville Café after the chili special.”
Bubba sighed. “Tell us about the job offer, Melvin.”
Melvin pursed his lips. It didn’t matter to him. “Somebody up to no damn good. Called me up, offered me a job, said I needed to start Thursday night. You know, the same night you done went and kilt yer fee-on-say.”
Tee frowned.
“You tell them you could start on Thursday night?” Bubba asked quietly.
Melvin thought about it. “No, as a matter of fact, she was real insistent about me starting Thursday night. I wanted to wait until Monday, and the lady on the phone said, ‘No sir, it’s Thursday night, or not at all.’ Offered me a big raise too.” His shoulders slumped. “Don’t know why someone would want to play such a silly trick on me. I ain’t done nothing to no one.”
“A woman called you,” Bubba repeated. “You remember the name she gave you or did she sound like she was from around here?”
Melvin’s eyes crossed even more than they were naturally. “I don’t think she said what her name was, but I think she was a Yankee. Sounded like one. Dint have no inflection in her voice. Trying to sound like one, you know, like folks who bin down in Texas a few years.” Then he grinned. “She sounded like she was a blonde, though. Wanted to get a look at her.”
Bubba looked at Tee. Tee looked at Bubba. Mike looked at the poster on the mobile tool box that featured Miss December, 2008. She was wearing a Santa hat and not much else.
“You sure about this, Melvin,” Tee said in his gravelly voice. “That woman’s voice couldn’t have been say, Miz Demetrice or maybe Miz Adelia Cedarbloom?”
“I have done heard Miz Demetrice afore,” Melvin said darkly. “She and Miz Adelia both have called here for Bubba. ‘Tweren’t neither of them. Of that, I’m sure.”
“Miz Demetrice couldn’t sound like a Yankee if you paid her,” Bubba muttered.
“Okay, then. What happened to the job?” Tee asked.
“I went up there,” Melvin said. “Weren’t no job. Weren’t no blonde human resources manager. Thought those people were going to die laughing at me. That fella in charge of that department was not only a man, but he wasn’t blonde, and he sure as hell wasn’t cute. I wasn’t amused.” He adjusted his glasses again. “Somebody done pulled a fast one on me. I’m inclined to wrap a monkey wrench round their head ifin I find out who.”
“Uh-huh,” Tee said. “You think maybe someone did that to get you out of the way on Thursday night?”
Melvin cogitated intently or as intently as Melvin could cogitate. “Why in the hell would someone want to do something like that?” He glanced at Bubba, who was gazing meaningfully at Melvin. “Oh.” Melvin took another prolonged moment to concentrate. “I reckon that could have been the way of it. But that would mean that Bubba dint kill no one and someone set him up.”
Mike continued to stare absorbedly at the Miss December poster.
Tee nodded. “You need to speak to the po-lice, Melvin. You need to tell Sheriff John about this. Ain’t no reason for Bubba to set himself up like that.”
Melvin shrugged dejectedly. “I reckon I should. But hey, Bubba, you sure you don’t want to take a look at Mr. McGee’s engine? The valves are good. It ain’t got nothing wrong with it, as far as I can tell.”
Bubba rolled his eyes. “Change out the gas and let it run a half-hour. Make sure you put premium in it and tell Bryan not to be so damn cheap when he’s buying gasoline. As a matter of fact, tell him to stop buying from the mayor’s brother. Think Henry Leroy gets his gasoline from sucking it out of old farm tanks.”
“Ah,” Melvin uttered, feeling a ray of hope within him. “Bad gasoline. That could be it.”
“Come on,” Bubba said to Tee. “I want you to see something.”
They left Melvin excitedly rubbing his hands together as he contemplated his next mechanical action. Tee took a rapt Mike by his shoulder and led him out of the garage bays. “Boy, they don’t look like that in real life.”
Mike said, “Oh, don’t say that. I gotta have some dreams.”
“Trust me.”
Bubba opened the door to Bufford’s Gas and Grocery store and there stood Leelah Wagonner, polishing off the counter and straightening up the tray of scratch-off lottery tickets. The door tinkled as they entered and she turned to look. Her eyes got big and round as she saw Tee, Bubba, and Mike. But when her eyes dropped to Bubba’s handcuffed wrists she said, “Oh, Bubba.”
“Miz Wagonner,” Bubba said without ado. “I hope your husband is doing well at the manure factory and your two children haven’t being playing with mud pies and tennis shoes lately.”
“Spaghetti-O’s,” Leelah said dismally. “They poured Spaghetti-O’s in the VHS part of the DVD/VHS player. What are you doing out of jail, Bubba?”
“I have to prove that I’m an innocent man, Miz Wagonner.” Bubba pointed at the surveillance cameras. “Did you know the cameras are dummies?”
Leelah’s eyes flickered up to the camera. “Well, yeah. You know about it. It’s a big joke. George Bufford is one cheap bastard. A body could get robbed and killed and…oh, sorry Bubba. Well, there wouldn’t be a soul to know about it, and…oh, I’m really sorry, Bubba.”
“It’s all right,” he said gruffly.
Tee and Mike didn’t know what to say. Finally Tee said, “What’s your point, Bubba?”
Bubba stepped over to the camera and yanked out the wires that fed into the false unit.
“It’s been cut. Someone came into the store and cut the leads, thinking the cameras were real.” Bubba dropped the wires. “I bet every one of them has been cut.”
Tee and Mike quickly ascertained that all three fake security cameras had their leads cut.
Returning to the front counter, Tee put his hands in his Sam Brown belt and thought about it. “Well, ifin a person thought they were real, and they didn’t want a record of them being in the store when in fact they were out murdering some poor woman, th
ey might have cut them, themselves.”
“Bubba knew about the cameras being fake,” Leelah protested. “We all did. If we got robbed, there’s nothing to have a record of it and we all know how often a 24-hour place like this gets robbed. I’ve been robbed three times in three years and,” she waved a hand at the fake device, “that’s George’s concession.”
Mike perked up. “So, if someone were framing Bubba and knew he would be alone here at Bufford’s and didn’t want him to have any proof of it, they might come in, wait until they had a free moment and snip the wires. None of the cameras point at each other, so there wouldn’t be a record of it, even if there were a real camera. Just someone walking up and then blackness.”
“That don’t matter,” Tee said. “Wasn’t real. Are you sure Bubba knew about the cameras being fake, Miz Wagonner?”
“Sure,” Leelah said. “All of us knew. It was a big old joke.”
“But how would someone know that a customer wouldn’t come in?” Mike said. “Or Bubba could have called someone to come in and take over the register.”
“Thursday nights aren’t real busy,” Leelah said. “Hours can go by without seeing a soul.”
“Which brings us to Witness Number Two.” Bubba nodded. “I need Mary Bradley’s address. Mark Evans, too. We need to have a few words with both of them.”
The surprised expression on Leelah’s face was comical. “Well, yeah, but Bubba, you’re not going to…hurt…anyone are you?”
Bubba tilted his head and looked sternly at Leelah. “When have I ever done anything to make you think I was going to hurt anyone?”
Leelah ticked off items on her hand. “There was the time you threatened to string Foot Johnson by his…by his…by a bodily part ifin he didn’t stop taking his Caddy down the back roads and messing up all the work you did on his suspension. Then there was the time that you told old man Witherspoon that he would be lucky if a surgeon could remove your foot from his ass on account of him pouring diesel into his gas engine and…”
Bubba interrupted. “Okay, but I didn’t really do any of those things, did I?”
“Well, no, Bubba. I already told you I thought you were innocent.” Leelah glanced over Tee and Mike’s shoulders at the door. “But I’m not sure if she does.
All three men turned in unison to look at the purely petite and beauteous figure of one Willodean Gray, Pegram County Sheriff’s Department Deputy. She had pulled in behind Tee’s minivan, spent a few minutes speaking with Melvin Wetmore, and walked noiselessly into Bufford’s with a determined look on her lovely face. It was the kind of look that said she wasn’t going to take any kind of bull hockey. Or any other kind of hockey for that matter.
“What in hell are you all up to?” Willodean said with emphasis on the word, ‘hell.’ “I mean, what in the red blazes of the deepest nether regions are you doing, Tee Gearheart? You let your prisoners out. You got your wife’s minivan and a baying Bassett Hound parked in the baby seat. You got a possible murderer with handcuffs on in the front and you got an arsonist without any kind of handcuffs just walking around. Then you’re escorting them around like you’re Crockett and he’s Tubbs. I don’t know who in the heck that makes Mike, but Jesus Christ, Tee, you really ought to know better.”
And, as Willodean’s appearance often did, all three men goggled mutely at her, lost in the good looks of the deputy. Finally, Tee said, “Well, hey, Deputy Gray. We were just going out for burritos.”
Chapter Nineteen – Bubba and More Questions
Still Saturday
“They’re looking for clues,” Leelah Wagonner said proudly. She glanced at Deputy Willodean Gray, saw that she was cute, sighed for her lost waistline, and told herself that life was good at the Wagonner house, no matter that Leelah would never be a size four again. Or a size six or probably even a size eight but that was really getting off the point. “Bubba’s an innocent man, just like Billy Joel said in that song.”
Willodean stared at Leelah in a manner that only a licensed law enforcement official could accomplish. The stare stated emphatically, ‘What on God’s green earth do you mean by that? Are you legally intoxicated? Have you been committing some kind of crime? How long do you think it will be before I get the truth out of you?’ It was a patented stare that three generations of Grays had perfected over decades of law enforcement. It was a stare very similar to the Snoddy stare of doom.
Finally, Willodean turned to look at Tee Gearheart, who winced and suddenly found the stained linoleum floor extremely interesting. Then she turned her authoritative gaze on Mike Holmgreen. Mike blushed and found a magazine nearby to examine. It didn’t particularly matter that the magazine was called ‘Texas Country Gardener’ or that he was holding it upside-down. Finally, Willodean’s daunting stare came to rest solely on Bubba.
Bubba didn’t flinch, blush, or glance away. He liked looking at Willodean. She was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. Not only that but she had a brain that she could actually use, plus she had a gun. Bubba wondered if she might be the kind of woman who liked to go fishing with a fella.
“Bubba,” Willodean said. “I just talked to Melvin Wetmore.”
Bubba nodded. A scene where Willodean and he were covered with chocolate Jell-O pudding popped into his head. Amazingly the two of them were covered with pudding and fishing for bass at the same time. Hmm. It’s purely amazing what a lack of sleep and being knocked unconscious will do to a man.
“I guess you know what he told me about the night that Melissa Dearman was murdered,” she said calmly.
“I guess Sheriff John didn’t really care to find out why no one else was around that night,” Bubba said, snapping back to the moment. There was a definite lack of chocolate Jell-O pudding. Dammit.
“I think he might very well say that you arranged it,” Willodean said promptly. “That’s what the D.A. is going to say. Then there wouldn’t be anyone around to say whether you came, went, or stayed right here. After all, you’ve been planning it for years.”
Bubba took a deep calming breath. A fella finally thinks of some circumstances that will take his butt out of a sling, and here comes someone to shoot him down. Not only was the shooter the beautiful Willodean, but she was most likely about to cut him off at the knees by dragging his hiney back to jail.
“Tell her about the wires on the cameras,” Leelah said quickly. “Ain’t no reason for Bubba to have done that. Uh-uh. He knew they weren’t real. Hell, we had a pot on who was going to get robbed next and the amount of time before the po-lice gave up on catching the thief. On account of us not having real security cameras and George’s die-hard stinginess.”
“The security cameras are dummies,” Willodean said, stating a fact.
“They are,” Bubba answered. “Someone else didn’t think so.”
So Bubba patiently explained to Willodean while Mike let Precious out of the minivan for a dogly rest break and Leelah proceeded about her business in the store. Two curious customers later, Willodean was staring at the cameras and rubbing her jaw in an agitated manner. “I’m going to get fired,” Willodean muttered. “I’m going to get fired and have to move back to Dallas and into my parent’s house. Dad’s going to say, ‘I told you not to move down to bumpkinville, honey.’ Mom’s going to make so many chocolate chip cookies that my ass will explode. I’m going to have to beg for that patrol job back again on the south side of Dallas. Then I’m going to die when some seventeen year old robs a 7-Eleven because he wants Twinkies and doesn’t have time to get his paycheck cashed from the fast food place he works at.”
Bubba listened to Willodean’s monologue with a great outpouring of sympathy. After all, Willodean didn’t need to put herself out for Bubba. She barely knew him, even though he’d very much like to change that. But first there was the little matter of the multiple murder charges, and not to mention making sure that Willodean didn’t get fired in the process.
Ah, life can be such a challenge, Bubba considered. “So are we a go?”
>
“Dammit,” Willodean grumbled miserably. “Where does Mary Bradley live?”
Leelah told Willodean happily.
Twenty minutes later, one county car with one deputy and one alleged felon drove up to the front of a house on Musgrave Road. The county car was followed by a minivan with one jailor, one felon who had pled his way into a very light sentence, and one Bassett Hound who was perturbed that she hadn’t been allowed to ride with her very favorite human in the whole world.
Like all of the houses on Musgrave Road, the one at which they’d stopped was one story, built in the 1950s, had a red brick exterior, and a car port big enough for the three rusting refrigerators and an automobile engine of unknown origin. There was also a decrepit Mercury Villager parked in the meager driveway, indicating that at least one person was in residence.
Bubba got out of the county car and walked around to open the door for Willodean. Willodean was not amused and used her own unhandcuffed wrists and hands to open the door for herself. She put her baton back into her belt, adjusted her shirt and said, “Let me do the talking, Bubba.”
The minivan parked behind the county car and Tee clambered out, followed by Mike, and Precious, who wasn’t about to let an opportunity pass her by again.
Consequently, there were four adults and one dog waiting at the front door when Mary Bradley answered the bell. Mary was in her forties with short blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She wasn’t trim and she wasn’t fat. She wore tight jeans and a t-shirt that proclaimed, ‘I’m still hot. It just comes in flashes.’
Mike started to ask what the t-shirt meant when Tee lightly slapped the eighteen year old on the back of the head.
Mary stared at her visitors and finally said, “Okay, then. Bubba, I didn’t know I was having a party today.”