by Joan Hess
“The room was occupied for several days, ma’am. We’ve been trained to look for evidence, and we couldn’t miss this batch unless we’d kept our eyes closed and our noses pinched. A male Caucasian with dark hair and propensity for lime aftershave and sexual activity, but we’ll know more when we get the lab reports back.”
I shoved the coffee cup aside so I could have better aim for my outraged stare. “Who was staying there?” I said slowly, each syllable enunciated with precision and great care.
Ruby Bee met my eyes for a second, then looked at the floor. “That EPA fellow. He came Friday afternoon.”
“He came Friday afternoon,” I echoed, incredulous. “You mean he just drove up and requested a room so he could disappear for four days? You didn’t think to mention it to me?”
“He didn’t exactly ask for a room,” Estelle said. “He was sort of brought in, but he didn’t object. Why, he was cracking jokes the entire time and acting like it was a Rotary luncheon.”
“Sort of brought in? Who was this delivery boy?”
“The town council.” Ruby Bee said it so low I almost didn’t catch it, and it took several seconds for it to sink in. It finally did, and it landed like a jab of electricity from a frayed cord. Plover was just sitting there, letting me do the work while he made stealthy scribbles in his notebook.
I finally found my breath. “Let me see if I have this right. The town council, meaning Jim Bob, Larry Joe, Roy, and Hobert, brought the EPA man to the motel and helped him check in for the weekend. Everybody thought it was so funny they acted like stand-up comedians, including the missing bureaucrat. Then one of the jokers politely drove the state car to the middle of the national forest and left it there, so that I’d waste time crawling around the blackberry thickets on my hands and knees to look for a corpse. That right so far, Ruby Bee?”
She nodded numbly. “Something like that. The man was maybe just a hair unhappy, and we did pick the unit with the double lock so he couldn’t change his mind in the middle of the night.”
“He had trays three times a day,” Estelle contributed, “and a scandalous number of bottles of bourbon. It wasn’t like he was in a dungeon or anything. The three of us took care of him right well.”
I stopped to count, and it didn’t take long. “Jaylee was providing entertainment, wasn’t she? Bringing trays and sex to the man in Number Three? You two ought to be hung from the sign out front—by your little pink toes, you know that? You are unbelievable, you and the councilmen! What you did was a felony, not some cute prank to fool the police while Jaylee rolled around in bed with the kidnapped man!”
Ruby Bee gave me the old hand-in-the-cookie-jar look, all wide-eyed and wounded to fake penitence better. “Jim Bob said we had to save Boone Creek. He said it was the only way. Remember how you used to swim there every summer, Ariel? It was always so cool and peaceful to just drift along in the current, watching the clouds and dreaming about the future. That’s partly why we were so nervous about you coming to the bar. We were afraid you’d catch on to what we was doing.”
“Felon!” I screeched.
“Ariel?” Plover said.
“Three cowboys and a pair of ducks,” Ho announced, placing his cards on the table with a flourish. “I won’t embarrass you boys by allowing you to show your pitiful straights and flushes.” Even as he raked in the chips, throwing out a few obligatory jeers along the way, he kept dwelling on his problem. He had the best reputation in the county, and it was real important to keep it. If his dealership dried up, he wouldn’t be able to support his two children anymore, and they sure as hell couldn’t last five minutes without him. His son was waiting tables in San Francisco; Ho didn’t want to even guess at what the boy did when he wasn’t prancing around in an apron. Mary Jane was married to a worthless son of a bitch who couldn’t hold down a job from one hunting season to the next, and she’d let herself get impregnated again, just like goddamn clockwork. It was a blessing that their mother wasn’t alive to see the wreckage the two had made of their lives.
Ho slammed a chip in the middle of the table. “Dollar to see the next card, boys.”
Plover dragged the rest of the story out of them. Afterward, I banged down a dollar and stomped out the front door, my eyes burning and my head so sore it felt likely to explode. Plover caught me in the parking lot and told me to wait there, then went around back to see what was happening at the crime scene. Even though it had sounded like an order, I waited, mostly because I was too tired to stir up enough perversity to leave.
Paulie drove up while I was standing there. “Is it true?” he said, controlled but grim.
“It’s true, and I’m sorry.” I was going to add more, but I started shivering so hard my teeth rattled. Hell, I’d liked Jaylee. She’d had a rough time and had managed to drag herself out and to try to do something that was sensible, if not exactly earth-shattering or profound. Vidal would have liked her, too. I got in the car with Paulie and turned up the heater.
“I heard from the sheriff’s office,” Paulie said. “I couldn’t believe it for a long time; I just sat there and thought how no one could take the life out of Jaylee. She was too happy, too excited, and eager to get out of this dump, too—” He broke off with a sob.
I patted his shoulder while he cried.
We were just sitting there when Plover came around the corner of the bar. He motioned for me to roll down the window, and said, “The sheriff has been in communication with my office, and we’ve decided to centralize the investigation here in Maggody. That means we’ll use your office, Chief, and you’ll be expected to give us full cooperation. I’ve already sent deputies to pick up the four council members and bring them in for questioning. The sheriff has agreed to call up his posse to search the woods for the EPA man, although he’s probably long gone by now. You’ve got time to go home and freshen up, and I’ll see you at your office in thirty minutes. Any questions?”
“Yeah, what’s your first name?”
“Sergeant.” He left, chuckling under his breath like some biddy on a nestful of eggs.
I told Paulie to drive me around to the back so I could get my car. “Where’ve you been all night?” I asked.
“Giving tickets like I said I was going to do. Collected about a hundred in fines and two promises to get my ass kicked in municipal court, which is about average.” He turned pink and added, “I turned the police band off so I could try to decide what to do, but I did stay awake. I went back to the PD about one and fooled around with the toxicology book, even though it isn’t going to do me one damn bit of good. What happened to—to Jaylee?”
“I don’t know yet, but I did learn some fascinating stuff about the occupancy of Number Three, which has some bearing on the case. You aren’t going believe your ears.” I told him what I’d learned about the kidnappee and the kidnappers, which included an impressive roster of local dignitaries and the police chief’s mother. He didn’t believe me at first, but, hell—I wouldn’t have either. I skipped the bit about Jaylee’s undercover visits to Number Three, stressing that her only involvement was to take trays and magazines and return with dirty dishes.
“In the middle of the afternoon and late at night?” Paulie laughed, but not with a real deep humor. “The fellow was a hungry sumbitch, wasn’t he?”
“We don’t know why she was there, and Drake didn’t hang around to explain. It looks bad for him. Maybe something happened between them, and he got frightened and killed her in a panic.”
“Right, Chief. He was so scared he hurried right out to steal a crossbow, then loaded it and waited for her to show up in the doorway. Standard panicky procedure.”
“Shit, I don’t know, Officer Buchanon. It’s only a couple of weeks to deer season; one of the Mafiosi might have brought a crossbow to the motel so the EPA fellow could look at it. In any case, it seems we’re having company at the PD, and I forgot to put on a bra. Don’t
go home; I’m going to need you today.”
I drove to the apartment and parked out front, thinking I’d drive back across the highway like a real cop. A state trooper stepped out of the shadows below the stairs, which I have to admit scared the piss out of me for a full three seconds.
He looked at my uniform, rumpled but there, and gave me a halfhearted salute. “You’re the chief of police?”
“I live here, in the upstairs apartment. Did you come to fetch Roy for questioning?”
“I did, but he ain’t here. His truck’s gone, and nobody could sleep through the racket I made on the back door.”
“Wait a minute.” I went upstairs, brushed my teeth, tethered my breasts, and grabbed the key to Roy’s store, given to me when I first moved in case I heard burglars making off with the porcelain pitchers. The deputy and I went inside and searched the back room, but Roy sure as hell wasn’t there.
He wasn’t the only one who’d flown the coop. When I got to the station, I heard that the entire council was out for the night. And nobody seemed to know where they were. Mrs. Jim Bob and Joyce Lambertino swore they didn’t know anything. Ho and Roy didn’t have anybody sharing their beds and available to tattle on them. The sheriff’s dispatcher said the patrol had searched the area north of Boone Creek and were moving along the bank toward the national forest.
For Sergeant Plover’s educational benefit, I ticked off the missing men on my fingers: Richard Drake, Jim Bob, Roy, Larry Joe, Hobert— and Carl Withers. You’d have thought Maggody was a black hole in the universe. Of course, I’d suspected as much since I was five year old.
8
Sergeant Plover thanked me for the nose count and asked if he might sit at my desk in order to use the telephone. I asked him where he expected me to sit, and he allowed that the PD was going to need some more furniture while it served as a crime room. We looked at each other for a long time, him grinning and me trying to decide what sort of first name he might have. Probably something stupid like Percival, I concluded. At least he’d found time to shave.
The sheriff’s boys came in to confer about things too complicated for little old me, so I told them to get a table and chairs from Roy’s store, tossed the key on the desk, and sailed out of there before the claustrophobia got a firm grip on me. One of the deputies stuck his head out the door before I reached my car.
“Sergeant Plover wants to know where you’re going, ma’am.”
A trick question. In the back of my mind, I was planning to go to Ruby Bee’s for breakfast and issue some more outrage at the treachery and deceit visited on me for the last five days. I was then going to have a paddy wagon from a convent pick up Ruby Bee and Estelle, and drive them away to a place where they’d have to behave—the worst punishment I could concoct on an empty stomach and four hours of sleep.”To hunt up the Mafia,” I told the deputy.
I went by the high school and learned that Larry Joe had called in sick the night before, around eight-thirty. He’d said it was a stomach virus and he would be out the rest of the week. The stomach virus reaches epidemic proportions around deer season, an annual medical mystery that employers and principals tactfully overlook.
Inside Larry Joe’s house I could hear the wails of three or four small children, a dog barking, and a woman’s voice screeching for mercy. I figured the latter must have been from the television, because Joyce was composed when she opened the door. She was a small, solemn woman whose hips had gotten away from her after several babies. There were gray streaks in her ponytail and too many lines around her eyes for a woman five years younger than me. The Marauders sweatshirt was faded, the letters almost washed out over the years. She kept the screen door between us, but I didn’t much care about being invited in—babies make me nervous.
“Hey, Arly, how are you?”
“I hear Larry Joe’s got the flu.”
She picked up a baby that had crawled between her feet and settled it on one hip. “That’s what he says.”
“If he’s here, I’m going to have to talk to him, Joyce. You heard about what happened last night?”
“I heard, and it’s just awful. Poor Jaylee …” She brushed away a snotty-nosed toddler clinging to her leg, then shifted the baby to the other hip and said, “Larry Joe’s not here. He and some of his buddies decided to go up to the camp to scout for a stand. They left about ten o’clock last night and won’t be back for a couple of days.”
“Where’s the camp?”
“I don’t know, Arly. Larry Joe doesn’t tell me that sort of thing. He’s always too busy telling me how dirty the house is and how loud and wild the children are.” She looked over her shoulder for a moment. “He’s right, but there ain’t a way to do any better with four children and a teacher’s paycheck, moonlighting and all. He won’t let me get a real job.”
I nodded and left before I started thinking too much about Joyce’s life. There wasn’t any point in it. I drove over to Jim Bob’s house and knocked on the door, wondering what conversations Jim Bob had with his wife.
Mrs. Jim Bob was still in her bathrobe, but her hair was combed and her face painted for the day. She invited me in and suggested coffee. When we were all cozy at the kitchen table, with coffee and a freshly baked cinnamon cake, she told me about the Missionary Society’s newest project to raise money for Ethiopian Baptists. Brother Verber was delighted with their efforts, she added with a Cheshire cat sort of smile.
“I have to find Jim Bob,” I said carefully.
“Why? He doesn’t have anything to do with— with what happened to that poor Withers girl. He barely knew her, and he wasn’t even in Maggody last night.” Mrs. Jim Bob cut me a generous square of cake and slid it across the table on a plate of bone china that matched the cup and saucer to the last rosebud. The lady of the manor, ever gracious to the hired help.
Pride yielded to instinct. “Yummy,” I said through a mouthful of crumbs. “If Jim Bob wasn’t in town last night, where was he?”
“My husband and his friends went up to their deer camp to tidy up and prepare for the season. I’d presumed they could wait until Friday, but they had a chat at the party and decided to leave early. Jim Bob had me pack some of my fried chicken and potato salad with poppy seed dressing for them, and the last of a baked bean casserole we’d had for dinner. I offered to bake a ham, but they were in too much of a hurry to wait.” She pushed the cake around her plate with her fork, then looked up with a bright, girl-to-girl smile. The lady did have a repertoire. “I always say that men can be like little boys when it comes to hunting. Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, absolutely. What time exactly did they leave?”
She gave me a superficially puzzled look, but her eyes forgot to participate. “I really couldn’t say, Arly, and I’m getting a bit uncomfortable with all these questions about my husband. Are you implying that his absence has something to do with last night’s dreadful tragedy?”
I told her that her husband, with a little help from his friends, had kidnapped a bureaucrat and kept him locked up at the motel for four days, although hardly in solitary confinement, then disappeared along with the victim. She sniffed and said she didn’t believe a word of it, not a single word, because Jim Bob wasn’t like that. I ate some more cake and asked where I might find the deer camp. She gazed out the kitchen window and said she didn’t keep up with that sort of thing. I finished the cake and coffee, leaned back in the chair, and asked if she knew what Jim Bob and Jaylee had been discussing in private at the party. She burst into tears. Oops. And I’d been doing so well.
I brought her a box of scented pastel tissues and patted her shoulder while she cried, which I was getting pretty good at, what with all the practice. Once she’d eased up to a steady dribble, I snitched another piece of cake and refilled our cups. When she calmed down, she managed to say she didn’t even know Jim Bob had been in the hall next to the kitchen with Jaylee for ten minutes, which
was an odd remark, considering I hadn’t told her the details.
“Are you sure you don’t know where the deer camp is?” I asked once more, praying she was too upset to hear the edge in my voice. “I’ve got to tell Jim Bob and the others what happened, since they can’t have heard yet. It’s likely that the EPA man is with them, and he’s the one who can tell us what happened at the motel last night. I need to question him and turn him over to the state police.”
She shook her head, too teary and morose for words, so I thanked her for the coffee and cake and left. Feeling like I had strewn a lot of carnage in my wake, I moved on to the Kwik-Screw for a chat with Dahlia O’Neill and Kevin Buchanon, the wunder-kinder of the fast gas business.
“Yeah, I saw Jim Bob last night,” Dahlia said, her chin spreading as she nodded. “He was here, then he left.”
“What time was he here?” I asked.
“I don’t rightly remember. What time do you think it was, Kevin?” She spoke so slowly I felt as if we were in an aquarium, forced to wait while the waves carried the sounds. Kevin shrugged and studied his shoes for oil splashes, leaving Dahlia on the spot. A big fat spot. After a muted belch, she thumped her chest and said, “Well, mebbe it was near ten.”
“What did he say?”
“He said to stay out of the storeroom,” she answered, snickering at Kevin.
“What else did he say?” I said it with forbearance, but my supply was getting depleted as fast as Kevin was turning red.
“He said he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow or the next day, because they were going to their deer camp. He took a couple of cases of beer, two bags of ice, and some bologna with him.”
“On his shoulders?”
“No, the beer was real heavy. He put the boxes in Roy’s pickup.”