Champagne for Buzzards

by Phyllis Smallman

  The leader of the pack was a skinny, gnarled man who had said goodbye to his teeth some years back. “That Lucan Percell never did get over Lovey; course neither do most of the men who clap eyes on her. Hardly a man in this town that doesn’t get weak in the knees at the sight of Lovey. Any that doesn’t, well let’s just say maybe they oughta get themselves checked.” The man turned his head to the side and spat a line of brown juice into the weeds at the edge of the sand parking lot. The side of the garage was speckled with brown spots from years of poor aim and juice caught by the wind.

  “You think Lucan’s death has anything to do with Lovey?” I asked.

  A corpulent man, the only one not tilting backwards on his plastic chair, cut in with, “Naw, why’d she kill him after all this time?”

  I hadn’t actually been thinking of Lovey as the killer but I didn’t point this out to the big fella. Knees splayed, one going east and one going west, and hands the size of dinner plates planted on his knees, he leaned towards me waiting for me to disagree with his assessment. He looked pugnacious enough to put me down on the ground and sit on me if I disagreed with him so I smiled and nodded in agreement.

  “Besides,” he continued, “Lucan gave lots of folks reason to kill him. Your man took him to court and that guy over at the tattoo parlor, that artist, told everyone in town he was glad Lucan was dead. Said better Lucan died than the turtles. Course,” he paused to pull on his ear, “doesn’t mean he wanted to kill Lucan, just that there were lots of things about Lucan that made people hate him. That April, she’s the only one that ever cared about him. Don’t know what will become of her.”

  “She’s leaving,” the tobacco chewer stated. “Going to her sister’s north of here somewhere.” They worried that around a little, surprised that she’d leave before the funeral and speculating if she ever meant to come back. “Don’t think she’ll be back,” Mr. Tobacco said. “She told Sue Clausen at the nursing home she’d wasted more than enough of her life in Independence.”

  The bald man smoothed back the hair that wasn’t there and tried to puzzle this out. “Don’t seem right not to stay until Lucan is buried.”

  It was Tully who brought up the Breslaus and created the silence you could hear all the way to Tallahassee. Seemed no one wanted to discuss the Breslau family.

  “The Breslaus have been hunting on Clay’s land,” I told them.

  The big fat fella frowned, “Just stay indoors and let them get on with it. Don’t go near them.”

  “Just best stay away from that family, specially that Boomer,” Mr. Tobacco advised.

  Boomer cast a pall over them even when he wasn’t physically there and fear settled around the old men like cloaks.

  Tully tipped back his chair and said, “Sheriff seems to be looking for someone out our way.”

  “That a fact?” the fat one said. He didn’t seem surprised and I was sure it didn’t come as news to him. None of them asked for details.

  “Who’s he looking for?” Tully asked. His question was answered with silent shrugs. Tully tried again. “Have you any idea why the sheriff thinks this stranger might be out our way?”

  “Ain’t got no idea,” their leader said, turning his head to spit one more time. “Best not to get ideas.” I tried another question. “Know what the guy’s done?” They just shook their heads. Strange they were interested in every other bit of gossip but not this. Maybe they had no idea what was going on or maybe they just didn’t want to know. When I tried to ask about Harland Breslau and what they grew on their farm, my questions were met with more uneasy silence, another subject not up for discussion. Nor were any of the other questions I tried. They weren’t going to speculate on any of the Breslau clan’s activities, even the sheriff’s, no matter how innocuous the questions.

  Their eyes slid away and their bodies eased off from us. They were growing restless and ready to bolt at the next mention of the Breslau name. The bald one confirmed this when he got to his feet preparing to leave and said, “Always best not to know too much about what the sheriff and his kin are up to, if you take my meaning. Safest just to stay clear of them.” The others nodded their heads in agreement and followed the bald guy out of the parking lot.

  “Well, we’re as popular as a fart at Sunday morning service, aren’t we?” Tully said, watching them amble away.

  “Yeah and when their wives see them coming home this early in the day we’ll win even fewer popularity contests. Whatever’s up with the Breslaus, this town wants no part of it.” How deep did the Breslau family have their talons into this community? It was pretty clear if I came up against Boomer I couldn’t expect any help from the town of Independence.

  I didn’t share this thought with Tully, although I was pretty sure he had figured it out as well.

  CHAPTER 31

  The moving trucks delivered even more furniture than I expected. Somehow having it all packed so tightly, piled right up to ceiling, had diminished the amount of stuff. I watched in wonder as piece after piece of furniture was carried across the ramp stretched from the rear of the truck to the front veranda. As Clay had said, some of the pieces were genuine antiques and some were just old. The just old and comfortable went into the family room off the kitchen. Clay already had a television and a couple of chairs in there. Now it was pleasantly overstuffed with lots of places to stretch out and nod off.

  It took two hours to unload the truck and place the furniture. Paying the movers by the hour made them more than happy to help us arrange it, change our minds and move it around again. It was starting to look like a real home, a place where a family lived.

  By one o’clock the trucks drove out the lane, leaving us in a stack of boxes. Marley climbed right into the nearest one, shredding paper and singing out in glee with every new treasure she uncovered. Pieces of glass and silver began to pile up around her. My job was to take each item where she directed. The cut crystal went to the dining room while the silver went to the kitchen for polishing.

  “Look at this,” Marley said, holding up a faux Louis XIV lamp with a shepherdess in iridescent pinks and blues on the base. She pulled a ball-fringed shade out of the box and plopped it on top. Another matching lamp was pulled out of the box like a rabbit from a top hat.

  “Way cool. Let’s put them in the living room for a touch of class,” I said.

  “You better be joking.”

  “They’re retro. I bet Clay’s grandma bought them back in the fifties.”

  “They are truly gross and ugly. Take them upstairs to the back bedroom.”

  “Gee, there’s even a junk room. Just like a real home.” Marley looked up at me. Her face kind of dissolved before she bit down on her lip and she ducked her head. I turned quickly away and headed upstairs.

  I was setting the lamps on a rickety little table that Marley had also delegated to the little back bedroom, when I caught a glimpse of movement through the window. I moved closer for a better look. Back beyond the open fields three ATVs drove along a path at the edge of the woods. At the lane to the farmhouse they swung apart and two went east while the third went left along the paddock. I ran for the binoculars that I’d seen in Clay’s office.

  When I returned, the ATVs had almost reached the farthest edge of the pasture. I put the glasses to my eyes, adjusted them and had Boomer Breslau in my sights. I followed him until he came up against a fence and couldn’t go any farther. He backed around into the fence, turned and started towards the lane and then hesitated, backing off the gas and turning to look at the house, some feral animal instinct telling him he was being watched. He was looking directly at the house, maybe even looking at the very window where I stood. He wore dark glasses and reason told me he couldn’t see me, but reason had nothing to do with the fear creeping up my spine. I jerked sideways to hide. The anger that had made me lash out at him was long gone and cool reason told me I’d made a terrible mistake, one I’d have t
o pay for and the amount due would surely exceed the pleasure his pain had given me.

  Slowly I eased forward, peeking around the edge of the window. Boomer still stared at the house. What was he considering? What was he planning?

  He turned away and his eyes went back to searching the underbrush. Something in the woods was more important than coming after me but sooner or later it would be my turn.

  The searchers on the east side had reached the end of the corridor between pasture and underbrush and were blocked from going any farther. They turned and slowly made their way back to join up again with Boomer, concentrating hard on searching the underbrush.

  Boomer tired of the hunt. He revved his machine and shot ahead fifty feet and then turned quickly and raced back along the edge of the wood, his frantic and mad behavior more designed to frighten his quarry than to find it. Was Boomer trying to scare his prey into making a break for it? As long as the guy Boomer was hunting hid deep in the woods he’d be safe.

  Boomer’s machine stopped. I used the glasses to check out Boomer’s bandaged hand. Only the tips of his fingers protruded from the casing.

  He leaned forward and stared into the underbrush. Across the handlebars of his ATV was a rifle. Even as the weapon registered in my field glasses, Boomer fumbled to unhook his weapon and swing it to his shoulder. He laid it across his right forearm and stood up on his machine. Gunfire erupted. The other two machines charged towards Boomer from the east.

  Harland Breslau’s face came into focus. Harland carried a rifle in his right hand. Kind, caring Harland, the man who looked after his wife with such tenderness, was taking part in this manhunt. And it had to be a man they were hunting. Harland wouldn’t have left Amanda to go hunting anything else with his son.

  My guess was it would take a whole lot of trouble for the Breslau clan to get Harland out here with Boomer.

  They searched along the length of the field but the undergrowth was too dense for them to enter. The three vehicles roared off and I watched them disappear back into the woods. I put the field glasses down on the table and wiped my sweating palms on my shorts. Bad things were happening out there and I didn’t know what to do. Telling the sheriff wasn’t an option. He knew exactly what was happening. He was the third man who had rushed up to join Boomer at the sounds of the shots.

  CHAPTER 32

  Downstairs, Ziggy and Tully were both still napping, undisturbed by the sounds of gunfire. “Did you hear anything?” I asked Marley. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know what, just some loud bangs out back.”

  “Old men farting,” she answered, grinning up at me.

  “Yeah, guess so. These old houses are so well built you can’t hear things inside.”

  Her hands stopped unwrapping newspaper. “You’re really worried, aren’t you?”

  “It’s this party.”

  She waved a hand. “Don’t give me that, it’s this Breslau guy.”

  “On sober reflection,” I told her, “I didn’t handle it as well as I could. Sometimes I act before I think.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I’ve noticed that. I also noticed that your easygoing charm is pretty easily gone these days.” Her forehead wrinkled with concern. “You think Boomer is going to become a real big problem?”

  I shrugged. “Hard to say with guys like that. Hopefully someone else will piss him off and distract him from me. I’ll be out of here in a few days and in the meantime I’m sticking close to the house. After the party I’m going to scoot right back to Jacaranda and the normal kind of crazies.”

  “Jac isn’t that far away. What if he follows you? What if he starts stalking you? If he’s a psychopath like you say, it’s a likely scenario.”

  “Then I know a guy with a big bat that does collections…” She clapped her hands over her ears. “Stop right there. I don’t want to know.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a whole lot of people you know that I don’t want to know, and a whole lot of things you know about that I don’t want to be involved in.” She lowered her hands. “Let’s just concentrate on getting the house ready.” “I’m trying to be honest here.”

  “In this situation honesty hasn’t got a lot to recommend it.”

  “You were asking, so I thought I’d tell you, see what you think.”

  “These days I believe that thinking should be done sparingly…enough to keep me from walking out in traffic but not enough for me to worry about traffic congestion.”

  “So I’m on my own here?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The conversation was over and I went back to transporting curios.

  Later, maybe a half-hour later, we heard the plane. It was small and flying low like it would if it was crop dusting — only there were no crops out in Clay’s nearly two hundred acres of swamp and woods. I stood on the back porch and watched the small aircraft fly north and then south, covering the whole property, and then watched it turn and fly across the whole area from east to west in a grid pattern. Whoever they were looking for, they weren’t sparing any expense.

  “Wow, look at this,” Marley yelled.

  I leaned over her and peered into the box. It was something electrical, that much I could tell, but it didn’t seem nearly as exciting as Marley thought it was. “What is it?”

  “It’s a chandelier,” Marley replied. She ripped open a cardboard packet and held up a long glass bobble. “And these are the crystal drops.”

  She set the drop aside and I helped her lift the base of the fixture out of the box. “It’s the biggest chandelier I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said. “Is it going to fit in the dining room?”

  “Oh, yeah,” replied Marley. “I’ll make it fit.” We set it down and Marley pulled out a second box, flat and rectangular, that was nestled below the fixture. It contained strings of glass, yards and yards of it. Our hoots of joy brought Uncle Ziggy from the back room, rubbing his sleep-tousled hair.

  “Why, that’s real pretty,” he said. “Is it all there?”

  “Let’s see.” Marley started pulling off the cardboard protection from the different pieces, spreading bobbles and bits all over the floor. Then Uncle Zig and Marley set to work reassembling it.

  “We’ll have to get an electrician to wire it for us,” Marley said.

  Uncle Zig snorted. “Why you want to do that when I’m right here?”

  “Can you do electricity?” Marley asked, her voice full of uncertainty, showing she knew my family only too well.

  “Know everything about it,” Zig said. “Well, I would, wouldn’t I, with all the things I’ve taken apart, even got some of them back together again.” He grinned at her.

  By four o’clock those household members who were still sane had rebelled and were sitting out on the front porch with long neck beers in their hands when the sheriff flew in with his normal amount of drama. He was looking a little ragged around the edges, like he hadn’t shaved quite so closely and as if his clothes weren’t quite so freshly laundered and pressed.

  “Have you found Howie yet?” I asked after a cold refreshment had been offered and turned down.

  “Nope, Howie will show up sooner or later.” A small smile confirmed his lack of concern. “He’s gone AWOL before. He’ll be somewhere comfortable.”

  “Got a little bundle of joy hidden away somewhere, has he?” Tully asked. All of the men were grinning. Howard’s secret was probably shared by every bit of testosterone in the county, a male conspiracy.

  Why do men hide and condone each other’s affairs while women in the same situation would rat each other out in a second? Or maybe that was just my own bias from watching Jimmy’s friends cheer him on in his wanderings. And then they’d always been shocked when Jimmy made a pass at their wives, which Jimmy would do eventually. Even friendship didn’t stop him from poaching on another man’s territory. More than one guy had
come whining to me and demanding I keep Jimmy from straying — as if I could.

  “Have you told Pearl you figure he’s safe?” I asked the sheriff.

  “Oh, Pearl’s got it figured, why else you think she came running ’round here with the pastor in tow? She had the right church but the wrong pew, if you know what I mean.”

  Uncle Ziggy and Tully broke into gales of laughter at this bit of wit.

  “Men are all disgusting,” I told them. “World would be better off without the lot of you.”

  “The world would end without us,” Tully pointed out. I was in no mood for this slice of truth.

  “Howard Sweet may well be as dead as Lucan. You do remember that murder don’t you, Sheriff?”

  His face turned scarlet. “City people don’t need to come out here and teach us how to do things. My men are working on it, searching for a suspect. Have any of you seen a man hanging about?”

  “You mean besides the dead one I found in my truck?” I asked.

  Sheriff Hozen went rigid. He growled, “Have you seen anyone about, in the fields or in the woods?” He looked to Tully and Ziggy, “Either of you seen anyone about? There’s been stories of a man hiding out on Clay’s property.” They both shook their heads in denial.

  I said, “I don’t suppose he’ll be wearing a baseball cap that says ‘Killer’ on it, will he?”

  “I just asked a simple question, Mrs. Travis. We don’t want anyone else to die, do we?” “You mean like Howie Sweet?”

  “I’d think finding Lucan’s body would convince you this was no time for jokes and no time to be at Riverwood. If I were you, I’d go back where I belonged. Where it’s safe.” The sheriff was trying hard to scare me out of my tutu and doing a pretty good job of it.

  “Oh, I surely will think on that,” I said. “You do frighten me, Sheriff. I’m just so glad you are here to look after us all.”

  Tully and Uncle Zig looked at me like I’d lost the last of my good sense. All that orange blossoms and honey was unbelievable to Tully and Ziggy, but there’s nothing like it to convince a man you’re not related to that he’s a hero and you trust him absolutely.