Malice in Maggody

by Joan Hess

  She parked in front of Number Three, just like Robbie had told her to a thousand times. After a furtive glance around the parking lot, she scurried to the door, unlocked it with trembling hands, and slipped inside.

  It was vacant. Empty. Unoccupied. Not a rat’s ass sign of Mr. Robbie Baby Drake.

  Jaylee swallowed an unladylike comment and went back to the door, her mouth screwed up with righteous anger. She threw the door open and squinted into the darkness.

  “You out there hiding, Robbie baby? Is this some kind of game to get back at me for being late?”

  There was a twitch of movement in the shadows, nothing you could put your finger on, just a twitch.

  “Is that you?” Jaylee said, suddenly afraid.

  The pain came from nowhere. It exploded in her throat, threw her against the half-open door, turned white and pink and purple at the same time like a crazy kaleidoscope show and a birthday party rolled into one. And red, so very red. She was thinking it was sorta pretty as she slid to the ground to die.

  6

  Maggody had been on the move earlier, but things quieted down long about eleven o’clock.

  Larry Joe and Roy arrived first at the deer camp, bleary from the beer and painfully conscious of the condition of their bladders. They took the boxes and sleeping bags out of the trunk and began to lug them inside, where it would be warm once they got the propane heater lit. It was getting damn cold, they agreed as they crossed paths in the weedy clearing.

  The second car came after a bit, delayed by the necessity of crawling along the ruts so as not to punch holes in the oil pan. The passenger in the back continued a steady stream of invectives. Jim Bob and Ho had quit paying much attention to him about the time they turned off the highway, not that they’d minded the cussing. It was almost instructive the vocabulary being on a higher plane than they were used to. Some of it was real colorful.

  There weren’t many lights burning in downtown Maggody, except for the streetlight in front of the post office and the light in the office of the middle school. The apartment above the antique shop was dark, as was the neon sign in front of Ruby Bee’s. A light in there suddenly went off, and the sound of a door being closed was followed by boozy female murmurs drifting into the parking lot. A nightcap was suggested in a naughty whisper.

  The Flamingo Inn sign was on, of course, in perpetual optimism that some leaden-eyed tourist could see the V can y sign and read it as a message from heaven, the means to salvation from falling asleep at the wheel and ending up in a ditch somewhere. A pink neon silhouette of peg-legged flamingo glittered below the words, in case someone couldn’t read too well. Behind the motel there was no light, just a smooth expanse of motionless darkness like an inland sea of ink. Jay lee’s body lay undisturbed in the doorway of Number Three.

  There was a yellow bulb beside the front door of the PD, and a light on inside. Through the Venetian blinds you could see a sad young man at the desk, a textbook clutched in two white fists as if he could absorb the material through brute physical contact. His eyes were red, but his lips continued to move as he read the emergency treatment for the inhalation of sulfur gas.

  In a small glow of light from a candle on the floor, the man with the swollen ankle wolfed down sandwiches as fast as he could, despite the fire snakes that darted up his leg. He was thinking about the thousand dollars he didn’t have, how he deserved it and was gonna get it. And somebody was gonna pay for every step of his trip, every minute he had spent in the goddamn freezing night. Gonna pay real bad.

  The lights were ablaze in the Kwik-Stoppe-Shoppe, promising a veritable haven of warmth and creature comforts in an otherwise oblivious town. Shelves of overpriced products were bathed in the white light to appeal from the highway, if anyone slowed down long enough to admire the view. Dahlia unwrapped a chocolate bar and popped half of it in her mouth, then tossed the paper on the floor and gazed down into the little cavern under the counter. Oddly inflamed by her impassive face, Kevin gave her a shy smile before returning to his lesson.

  There was a light on at the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall, although it was hardly regular prayer-meeting time. The two kneeling figures didn’t care; there was sin afoot in Maggody, and only immediate appeals to God could save the collective soul of the community from the clutches of Satan himself.

  In a small house in Farberville, a bedroom light snapped on. A figure stumbled to the bathroom for a glass of water, then retraced his path back to bed, muttering all the time. She had to have a first name. Everybody had a first name. Nobody named an innocent baby Chief, unless it was some crazy Indian papa with grand ideas. Maybe he could get it from Camden, if he could think of a legitimate-sounding reason.

  7

  The telephone rang six or seven times before it wormed its way into my dream. I rolled across the bed and grabbed the damn thing, thinking of a few choice words for anyone dumb enough to wake me up in the middle of the night. “Ariel! You got to get over here real quick!” The only person who calls me Ariel is Ruby Bee. For the record, I was not named after the character from Shakepeare’s Tempest; I was named after a photograph of Maggody taken from an airplane. Ruby Bee, not exactly a champion speller, has a copy of it in her bedroom, the bar and motel outlined in ink. The Hanks clan is notorious for whimsy when naming innocent babies—Ruby Bee is a nickname for Rubella Belinda. Everybody agreed it had a fine ring to it.

  “What time is it?” I growled.

  “I don’t know—just get over here!”

  “I’m not moving until you tell me what time it is and why I’m supposed to ‘get over here,’ ” I said through a yawn. I might have sounded a mite peevish by this point.

  “It’s right about three, I’m at the motel and—” She made a gurgly noise, like she was trying not to break down or throw up. “It’s Jaylee, Ariel. She’s dead.”

  I sat up, switched on the lamp, and stared at the receiver. “She’s dead? What are you talking about? Jaylee told me she was leaving town after the party.”

  “She never made it. Her body’s on the ground in front of Number Three, and you’d better get over here and do something.”

  I promised to be there in a couple of minutes. I threw on some clothes, called the sheriff’s department, grabbed my gun, and ran down the stairs, too shocked to try to figure out what the hell was going on or what Jaylee was doing at the Flamingo Motel when she should have been a hundred miles along the road to success.

  After a drive down the center of the highway at seventy miles per hour, I squealed into the parking lot, tore around back, and slammed on the brakes in a spray of gravel and dust, just as Bullitt would have done. I hadn’t bothered with the bubble light, since not a creature was stirring in Maggody at such an hour.

  Estelle and Ruby Bee were standing under the porch light in front of Number One. The dull light made them look eerie, as if they were characters in some voodoo melodrama off-off-Broadway. I gaped at the heap in the doorway of Number Three, then joined them on the porch.

  “Are you sure she’s dead?” I asked in a low voice.

  “I’m sure,” Ruby Bee said. “Her eyes are wide open and staring at nothing I could see. She has a funny, surprised look on her face, but she sort of looks like she’s smiling.” She shivered, then said, “There’s a lot of blood, Ariel—her neck was busted open and it must have spewed out for a long time.”

  I knew I was supposed to hold the scene until the sheriff’s boys arrived, but there wasn’t a soul in sight except the three of us, so I left the tape and stakes in the trunk of my car. The rubberneckers would come in hordes the next day; for the moment they were all in their beds. Praise the Lord and pass up the police procedure.

  “You’d better go look,” Estelle said. She and Ruby Bee exchanged the guarded looks I had learned to expect, and seemed to arrive at an understanding. “We got to tell you something afterwards.”

  I d
oled out a pair of scowls, then went across the gravel to do a quick examination of the body. Ruby Bee was right about the smile on Jaylee’s face—and the blood. I squatted down and studied the splattered flesh that had been her neck before someone put a four-inch hole in it. She couldn’t have survived for more than a few seconds, but it had been long enough to let her heart pump out most of the blood in her body.

  There was no weapon to be seen. I was pretty sure I knew what had made the wound (a mild word for such violence), but I decided to let the medical examiner make the formal announcement. Anyone who grows up in a place where all males over the age of eight hunt learns to recognize the methodology of death. A crossbow arrow this time. As deadly as a bullet and as silent as snow, except for one tiny twang. Even if she’d heard it, there wouldn’t have been time to duck.

  Blue lights started flashing all over the place. Doors slammed, men barked at each other, radios crackled and popped, boots crunched across the gravel. Puffs of vapor rose from mouths as if they’d internalized cigarettes.

  Robert Drake was not delighted with his new accommodations. The rusty silver trailer didn’t have any plumbing he could find, and it smelled like a wet dog had puked daily in it for a solid month. The furniture in the motel hadn’t been any great shakes, but this stuff was horrible. The bed was lumpy, the dresser right out of a damaged-freight sale, the walls painted a nauseating shade of green that matched his mood. The carpet was matted so badly it didn’t have a color.

  He got off the bed (ha!) and went to the door of the room, which took all of two steps. His captors still hunkered around a dinette table, with untidy piles of plastic poker chips between the beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. The room was thick with a blue cloud of smoke from cheap cigars. The goddamn poker game had been going on for hours. Robert had played for a time, but they’d fleeced him without mercy and he didn’t like to lose.

  “How long are you going to keep me here?” he demanded from the doorway.

  Jim Bob glanced up. “Nobody’s keeping you, Drake. You can head out anytime you want. Be sure and send us a postcard if you think about it.” He turned back to the game. “Now, Roy, if I honestly believed you had another lady in the hole, I’d have to fold and let you rake in them pretty chips. But a little birdie keeps whispering in my ear that you ain’t got horsefeathers in the hole, so I think I’ll see you raise and add another ten to sweeten the pot.”

  “Your ten, and ten more,” Roy said, leaning back with a smug look. Larry Joe dropped his cards on the table and reached into an ice chest for another beer. Ho belched in surprise and folded.

  “Read ’em and weep,” Jim Bob said as he spread his cards.

  “Goddamn it!” Robert went back into the tiny room and flopped across the bed. “Nobody’s keeping you, Drake,” he said in a bitter voice. “You can head out anytime you want to, and remember to send us a goddamn postcard! Just send it care of Smokey the Bear.”

  First, they’d come for him like a gang of storm troopers, marched him out the door, and forced him to climb into the trunk of a Cadillac. It had been what felt like hours before anybody had thought to see if he’d suffocated. Goddamn clowns deserved a murder rap. He’d been afraid they’d leave him there, in the stinking coffin, but they finally decided to put him in the back seat of some four-wheel crate that was almost worse than the Caddie trunk, if you breathed deeply.

  He’d been blindfolded during the drive, but he could tell they were at least twenty miles into nowhere; the last few miles had been on a road so rough he’d almost lost his dinner. He glared through the narrow window at the blackness outside. The shitheels in the other room would get a real kick out of him trying to escape in that pitch-black crap. They knew, as did he, that he’d make it about five feet from the trailer, then fall down and break a leg—or run into some sort of bear or mountain lion and end up as a midnight snack. He had no idea which way to go. No flashlight, no heavy shoes, or even a warm coat. There wasn’t any way to stroll out of the mess he was in. What he needed, he thought with a sly smile, was a set of car keys.

  He went back into the other room and sat down at the table. “Deal me in. I trust you gentlemen’ll take a check.”

  I was questioned about the identify and other vitals of the body and allowed to admit I had no idea what had happened in the doorway of Number Three. After I was instructed to remain available, I was ignored for a long time while the county men did the mundane details. The county coroner arrived after an hour, puffing and wheezing about being routed from bed in the middle of the night just so he could tell them what any damn fool could see in one glance. The ambulance came and left with a delivery for the morgue. One deputy did a fair outline in chalk of the blood splatters that had turned to dirty brown on the walk, the wall, the door, and the edge of the gravel. Everybody agreed there was a lot of blood.

  Sergeant Plover arrived toward sunrise, looking as gray as the cold mushy fog he’d brought with him. He didn’t even wave before he joined the big boys for a long, low talk, which I thought was less than polite, considering our history. After a lot of talk, things settled down and the carnival began to pack up and drift away.

  At some point Ruby Bee and Estelle had drifted away, too. We hadn’t had our cozy little chat yet, and I found myself hoping we could have it over coffee hot enough to stop my shivers. I was eyeing the back of the bar for signs of life or smells of coffee when Plover deigned to acknowledge my insignificant presence. “Where’s the woman who found the body?”

  “Making coffee, I hope. And how are you this lovely October morning, Sergeant Plover?”

  He scratched his cheek, which was sprouting stubbles before my eyes. You would have thought he could have wasted a few seconds with a razor before heading into the limelight. He gave me a slow study and drawled, “I’m fine, Chief Hanks. How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you.” I rewarded him with a smile and started for the kitchen door.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, actually touching my jacket. “You haven’t given me a report yet, or told me where to find the witness. This isn’t the time for childish tantrums, Chief.” He hit the last word hard, as if it were an insult. I’d always liked the word, but I flinched at his tone.

  “It is the time for coffee, however, so that’s where I’m going. I’ll tell you what I know while I thaw and then introduce you to the witness, who is also my mother.”

  Ruby Bee had indeed made coffee; it smelled so good I would have fainted if Sergeant Plover hadn’t been stepping on my heels. Estelle was slumped over the bar, her head supported by her fists. Her eyes redder than big cherries and her face streaked with black snail tracks of mascara. Ruby Bee looked just as bad as she came out of the kitchen with a tray of cups and saucers. Someone had cast a shadow on the sunshine girls.

  I introduced everybody to everybody else and crawled into the coffee. Sergeant Plover (maybe he didn’t have a first name) asked Ruby Bee when she’d found Jaylee’s body. It struck me as an innocent question, but Ruby Bee recoiled like he’d spit at her. Estelle just closed her eyes and let out a despondent sigh.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Ruby Bee managed to say in a shaky voice. “We closed up about one, then stayed around more than an hour to pull down the crepe paper and bust the balloons.

  They was for Jaylee’s party, and they looked real pretty.

  “Jaylee Withers, the victim,” Plover said, nodding. “Why don’t you pour me some coffee, then you and Miss Oppers can tell me all about the party?”

  The two of them related the purpose and highlights of the party and, with prodding, the guest list as best they could remember. I was mentioned, which merited a raised eyebrow or two. I dumped a couple of teaspoonfuls of sugar into the next cup of coffee, figuring I would need a little excess energy soon, then decided to be a good cop.

  “He told me she was leaving town as soon as she could get away from the party,” I volunteered. “That was
about seven o’clock.”

  “Jaylee finally got away around a quarter after eight,” Ruby Bee said. “She said she was going straight to her mobile home and expected to leave town as soon as she was packed. She gave me a real nice hug, like I was her mother, and promised to write.” She hiccupped in her coffee cup, her shoulders hunched up tight with misery.

  “We found her car parked behind the motel, loaded with suitcases and makeup paraphernalia. She had more than a thousand dollars in her purse. That blows robbery as a motive.” Plover scratched his cheek for a while, then looked at me. “If she intended to pack and leave, why did she go to the motel?”

  “I have no idea,” I said brightly. “Let’s ask our witnesses.”

  Our witnesses turned whiter than unblanched string beans in a Mason jar. They both began gabbling denials of any knowledge of anything at all, until Plover tired of it and raised his hand to stop them in mid-gab.

  “Then why don’t we leave that for later and move on to another fascinating question: Who was staying in Number Three?”

  “Nobody,” Ruby Bee gasped. “I haven’t had anyone stay at the motel for more them a month, and then it was some kids from Starley City who wanted a place to drink beer and—”