“Sure.” Cami dipped the rest of her zucchini into the sauce. “No problem. Ohmigod, is that Bobby?”
Harley didn’t have to turn and look. Cami looked like she was about to wet herself. “It is. Jeez, Harley, he’s even hotter than in high school.”
Bobby pulled out a chair and turned it around to straddle it. He looked first at Cami then at Harley. “What’s up?”
“Not much. We paid a little visit to Jernigan’s Jewelers this morning.” She paused, mainly to see if he reacted to the name of the jeweler’s, but his expression gave away nothing. “I think I have a connection that will be helpful.”
“You think?” He picked up a fried mushroom from the plastic basket and dunked it in the sauce. “What kind of connection?”
“Let’s just say there’s a questionable relationship between the jeweler, an alarm company, and burglarized houses in East Memphis.”
Across the table, Cami looked fascinated. Her eyes darted from Harley to Bobby and back a few times as if trying to figure out just what was going on, but also with a kind of shiny appreciation.
“Just how did you come to that conclusion?” Bobby wanted to know.
“I’ll let you figure out the obvious. I’m just doing my civic duty. Remember our deal.”
“We had no deal.” When her eyes narrowed at him, he added, “but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Hey Bobby,” Cami said in the awkward silence that fell, “good to see you again.”
Bobby grinned. “I can’t believe you’re still keeping bad company, Cami. Didn’t you learn anything from Harley’s schemes after spending a night in juvie?”
“That was a long time ago. We’ve progressed. Besides, my life’s been too dull lately.”
“Stick around Harley too long and you’ll wish for dull again.” He stood up. “If this is all you’ve got, I’ve got to see a man about a dog.”
The phrase could mean anything from going to the bathroom to leaving, but somehow Harley thought this time he meant it literally. She tensed. “Did you find Yogi?”
Bobby wore that blank cop expression again. “Maybe. You hear from him?”
“Not a peep. Dammit, Bobby, I’ve kept my bargain, you keep yours.”
“You haven’t kept our bargain. Are you saying you’ve told me everything you know?”
“Everything I suspect.” Maybe she’d hold out about the license plate info and the Lincoln. It’d give her a bargaining chip in case she needed it to help Yogi.
“See ya, Harley. And Cami, take some advice and don’t let her talk you into anything else stupid. 201 Poplar’s a lot different than juvie.”
“What does he mean by that?” Cami asked when Bobby was gone. “Could we really end up in jail?”
“Bobby’s an asshole. I knew better than to call him.”
“Harley, maybe he’s right. This could be really dangerous. Maybe you should let the cops handle it.”
“They’ve made up their minds that Yogi is guilty, that he’s involved. They’re not even trying to find anyone else to blame, and I don’t want them railroading Yogi just because he’s made a few mistakes in his life. Okay, a lot of mistakes.” She raked a hand through her hair, frustrated and frightened for her father. “He’s got a record. They’ll be so quick to blame him, and while I don’t think Bobby would frame Yogi or anything, the police department is overworked and understaffed, and I’m afraid they’ll take the obvious way out unless I find out the truth.”
Cami looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “Whatever you decide to do, I’m with you on it.”
She smiled in relief. “I knew you would be.”
They left Newby’s and headed for Harley’s apartment. She wanted to scope it out and see if it was safe enough to go in and check her answering machine. Two days of not hearing from her parents made her antsy. They sat in the car ten minutes before she decided it was safe.
It was still a mess. Cami stood open-mouthed in the doorway while Harley picked a path through overturned furniture and the contents of drawers. What looked like graphite dusted the surfaces of tables and counters. A light blinked on her answering machine and she hit the button. Three new messages, two from automated telemarketers, one from her grandmother reminding her to ask Diva to join them for lunch. As if she needed a reminder. She needed to find Diva.
She stared down at her answering machine and the red digital display announcing five messages. Five? She hit the button again to start replay from the beginning, and Diva said, “Hey Harley, I’ve been trying to reach you but can’t remember your cell phone number. I left my book at home. Anyway, hope you get this message. Just want you to know we’re okay. Tell Eric we’ll be home as soon as we can. Oh, and watch out for Chinese pugs.”
The date/time recorded it as coming in at 7:04 PM the day before. The next message was a moment of heavy silence, then a hang-up and the recording said, If you’d like to dial a number, please hang up and try again. That was at 7:09. She punched the button and looked up at Cami.
“Bobby’s already listened to Diva’s message, I’m willing to bet. He knows where they are. The police can trace calls.”
Cami stepped gingerly over a couch cushion. “So can you, if you look at Caller ID. And what do you think she meant about watching out for Chinese pugs?”
Well, duh. She should have thought of that. She picked up the phone and held down the arrow to view the numbers that had called. It was a pay phone number with a 901 area code. That meant they were still pretty close to Memphis anyway.
“I have no idea what she meant about pugs. Diva’s prone to saying inexplicable things. Ah. Here’s the number. And I know how to find out where it’s located.”
She called Tootsie at work and asked him if he could find out where a pay phone was located. He could, of course, and called her back in a few minutes with the address. It was out on Jackson Avenue, not a great section of town in places. What the heck were they doing out there? While she had him on the line, she got him to run the plate number of the Lincoln. It was registered to a NuVo Rich Warehouse, Ltd.
“Do you think Yogi and Diva are in police custody?” Cami asked when she hung up.
“No. If they were, Bobby wouldn’t have been so quick to find out what I knew.” She’d grabbed her basket of clean clothes, and handed it to Cami. “Hold these. It won’t take a minute to get my other stuff. It’s okay if I stay at your house again tonight isn’t it?”
It was of course, as she’d known it would be. Cami had always been a sucker for living dangerously. The only child of straight-laced parents, she’d thought Harley’s childhood in a dusty commune in southern California exciting and exotic. She’d never been able to quite convince Cami that the reality had been hot, depressing, and anything but exotic. While still a culture shock, the move to Memphis had been welcome in its normalcy. The city had insisted upon her attending a state-sanctioned school and ignored Diva’s assertion that the universe taught far more valuable lessons. But it’d been Harley’s own determination that convinced her parents she and Eric should enroll in St. Ann’s Catholic School one block over from their house on Douglass. Kindergarten through the eighth grades were taught in a regimen that appealed to her craving for the structure that had been lacking in her early life. There was more of Grandmother Eaton in her than she cared to admit. For which Eric still hadn’t quite forgiven her.
On the way back downstairs to Cami’s car they passed Stuart Sprague, a Yuppie type who was probably in his twenties and looked older. He gave Harley a dark look. “How’s Tammy?” she asked him, and he paused.
“She’ll be fine, no thanks to your friend.”
“If you mean the guy who hit her in the head, my friends don’t usually make a habit of doing that, no matter how they may feel about me. Obviously, it wasn’t a friend, Stu.”
“Whatever. Friend or repo man, he knew you.”
“If he knew me, he wouldn’t have mistaken Tammy for me, would he?” Stu looked a bit perplexed by that logic, so sh
e asked, “Did Tammy get a good look at him?”
“Medium height, thin, greasy black hair. Ring any bells?”
“Not the faintest ding. Later, Stu.”
When they were in the car she told Cami, “It was the same guy who hit me in Yogi’s shop. I bet he’s familiar with Jernigan’s Jewelers. Did you see anybody fitting that description?”
“No, just the manager, Neil Campbell. He was kinda fat, balding, wore glasses.”
Three different guys were somehow involved in this. Lincoln, Greaser, and Campbell. So how was Yogi mixed up with them? There had to be a connection. Greaser thought she had an expensive necklace found in Yogi’s workshop, and Lincoln had been in Mrs. Trumble’s driveway right before she was killed. Campbell knew Lincoln. And as far as she knew, Yogi didn’t know any of them. Except Mrs. Trumble. She was the obvious common link.
“We need to visit Mrs. Shipley,” Harley said, and Cami looked surprised but agreeable. If anyone knew anything about Mrs. Trumble, it’d be the one-woman, self-assigned Neighborhood Watch sentry, Sadie Shipley.
Mrs. Shipley was delighted to oblige. She ushered them into her kitchen crowded with bits of wall art that would be considered Retro at any secondhand shop in town. Orange mushrooms, plaster vegetables, a cat clock with moving eyes and swinging tail, pictures of birds made of yarn and mosaic tiles, and paint-by-number scenes of pansies and seashores filled every square inch of lime-green walls. Cami looked fascinated. Harley felt nauseous.
“Mavis Trumble,” Mrs. Shipley said, “had no sense of style. She wasn’t that much older than me, you know. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Not really. Mrs. Shipley’s dyed orange hair did nothing to distract from flesh sagging into comfortable wrinkles like a partially melted wax doll. Her eyebrows were penciled in, she wore bright blue eye shadow that, fortunately, was mostly hidden in folds of skin, and her mouth sported a shade of lipstick that Harley remembered being named Orange Flip. Spots of rosy blush coated cheekbones that must have once been high, but now seemed to blend into her jaw line.
“Trumble always seemed old to me,” Cami said tactfully, and Harley nodded.
“She was never very nice. We thought maybe you could tell us something about her that would make us feel better about her as a person.”
“We called her Terrible Trumble when we were kids,” Cami added, and Mrs. Shipley found that amusing.
“Hee hee, I told Mavis not to be so hard on you all, but she never had any of her own so didn’t really like kids. How ’bout I fix you girls a coke?” She resembled a tropical bird fluttering about the kitchen, getting out glasses and a plastic bowl of ice. “What kind of coke y’all want? I’ve got some Orange Crush, ginger ale, RC, NuGrape—”
Cami chose the orange; Harley had Classic Coke on ice. The usage of Coke to describe any and all kinds of soft drinks was one of the things that had taken her a while to get used to when she first moved to Memphis. It was a Southern thing, she figured, a bit like getting used to grits and corn bread. And speech mannerisms.
“Well, Mavis never was the nicest thing, bless her heart,” Mrs. Shipley said when they all had cokes and slices of Karo pecan pie, “but that was just her way.”
That was proper Southern etiquette; the most horrible insult was always acceptable if the phrase “bless his—or her—heart” was added right after it, such as, “She’s so bucktoothed she could eat an apple through a picket fence, bless her heart.”
“Mavis had a hard life, you know,” Mrs. Shipley continued. “Grew up on the backside of nowhere down in Miss’ippi, and then married a man from Ohio. It never does to marry outside your own kind. I imagine you know that well enough, Harley Jean.”
“Yogi was born in Memphis,” Harley defended her father, knowing what she meant by her reference, “and besides—he and Diva are a lot alike.”
Ignoring that, Mrs. Shipley went on, “After her husband died, Mavis should have enjoyed life like I am. Oh, not that I didn’t love Charlie Shipley, but I did get awful tired of watching those dang sports on TV all the time. He’d watch two pigs fighting over a corn cob if that was all there was on, bless his heart. Football, baseball, basketball, wrestling. Well, I miss him, but I haven’t had to hear that god-awful Howard Cusack since Charlie died.”
“Cosell,” Harley corrected. She politely refrained from pointing out that Cosell had been dead since 1995, and that Charlie Shipley hadn’t died until 1999 as she tried to guide her back to the subject. “So Mrs. Trumble didn’t have any other relatives?”
“A sister. Married twice. She moved to Michigan years ago, but her boys used to come for a visit fairly often. They were older than you two by about five or six years, I guess. Always rather scrawny young’uns, with close-set shifty eyes that reminded me of little weasels. Bless their hearts. More pie, Harley Jean?”
Harley shook her head. “Thank you, this pie is just so wonderful I could eat three pieces, but I’m about to bust. I suppose her sister is down here seeing to the funeral details?”
“She’s in ill health the last I heard, but her boys live down here. They moved back a year or so ago, I think.”
“Really.” Harley thought about her next question a moment, and then said, “That must have been a comfort to Mrs. Trumble, having relatives close by.”
“It should have been. Archie got to coming by fairly often last time I talked to her. I saw him a few times. Still scrawny and shifty-lookin’ but polite enough.”
Scrawny? Shifty? That fit. “Archie—I don’t think I remember him. What’s his last name?”
“Don’t get me to lying, Harley Jean. I do good to remember my own last name.” She paused so they could assure her that her memory was like it always was, sharp as a tack, then said brightly, “His brother’s name is Bill, I think. Maybe Bob. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. I ran into Archie not long ago, he seemed in an awful hurry. No time for conversation these days, people just running here and there and everywhere like they have good sense, but never seem to get anything done. I remember—”
“Does Archie drive a new black car?”
“Lordy no, he drives some kind of shabby piece of junk that smokes like a crop duster. I don’t think he’s doing near as well as Mavis claimed, though he always seemed to have lots of money on him. Had a wad of bills big enough to choke a mule in his pocket, she said. Not that she was given to lying, but I’m willing to bet he got that money selling drugs or something. He didn’t look the type to do an honest day’s work. Bless his heart.”
It was a bit disappointing that the nephew didn’t have a black car, but that didn’t rule him out. He could work for the warehouse where it was registered. A man who’d flash a wad of cash to his elderly aunt probably had a few character defects that might lead him to a life of crime. Like jewelry theft, for instance.
When they left Mrs. Shipley’s house, after hearing gossip about the teenage girl down the street, the Anderson’s divorce, and the various people who visited that good-looking Bruno Jett, it was nearly five in the afternoon. Douglass Street residents would be arriving home from work soon, those who still had jobs and weren’t retired. Or undercover cops.
Harley hoped Morgan didn’t look out his darkened front window and see her with Cami. He was a complication she didn’t need right now. Mrs. Shipley had given her some ideas to think about. Would Yogi have known the nephew well enough to let him leave some jewelry in his workshop? Why would Yogi still be speaking to Archie if Mrs. Trumble had a restraining order out on him? It made more sense that Morgan or someone he knew had left it there. Then again, none of this made much sense.
Her hope that Morgan wouldn’t see her died a swift death once outside. He leaned against Cami’s car, arms folded across his chest, sunglasses hiding his eyes. How unfortunate.
“God, who is that?” Cami breathed.
“Don’t ask.” Black tee shirt and tight jeans carried a powerful punch.
Morgan didn’t move when Harley reached the car, and since he blocked
her access to the door, she had to speak to him. “Move, please.”
“We need to talk.”
Harley narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so, Mister Jett.”
Cami made some kind of sound halfway between a sigh and a groan. She resembled a big bug with her huge sunglasses dwarfing her face and her mouth open, staring at Morgan.
“You don’t think, period.” He had her by the arm before she could avoid it, and he pulled her to one side away from the car and Cami and possible flight. She wondered if she could do a replay of the knee in the groin thing, then decided against it.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked when they stood a couple of yards away from the car, “You’re stirring up trouble.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m visiting a neighbor. When did that become a crime worthy of MPD notice?”
“Keep your voice down. I hope you kept your promise. Your friend doesn’t need to be any more involved in this than she is already. Baroni thinks you can be trusted. I’m not convinced.” How nice that Bobby had said that. She revised her earlier opinion of his faith in her. She had apparently misjudged him. Maybe she should relent and tell him about the license plate. And the threatening phone calls. She’d bet a dollar to a doughnut Archie was involved with both.
“How do I know I can trust you?” she countered when Morgan seemed to expect some kind of answer. “You’ve got your own agenda. It’s not necessarily compatible with mine.”
“I could take you in for questioning, you know.”
“But you won’t. It’d blow your cover for sure.”
“Like it’s not already blown?”
“But you don’t know that. I haven’t said anything to anyone about you, except that you’re a major pain in the ass, and your name or photo hasn’t been in the paper or on the news. You’re still an itinerant jewelry salesman, for all anyone knows.”
Morgan looked irritated. His mouth tucked in at one corner, and his jaw flexed like he wanted to say something nasty but was holding back. Such restraint was admirable. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
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