by Joan Hess
Plover must have been feeling left out, because he gave me a dirty look and said, “The kidnapping charges will be evaluated at a later time. We need to discuss the murder that happened last night at the motel. Did Mrs. Withers offer to help you escape, Drake?”
“Mrs. Withers my ass,” Carl muttered. “Mrs. Goddamn Whore, if’n you ask me.” We hadn’t. “What murder?” Drake squeaked.
I told him about Jaylee. He tried to tell me she was in Little Rock, and it took all of us (a la a cappella choir) to convince him otherwise. Even Sergeant Sincerity Plover had to do some serious nodding and a brief recitation of the reports from the crime lab. Once Drake grasped the point, Plover again asked if Jaylee had offered to help the man escape.
Shivering, Drake gulped down more coffee. “That’s right, Sergeant. We were both afraid that this animal saw us through the window while we were—uh, resting and talking about Mrs. Withers’s plans for the future. Mrs. Withers was certain he would misinterpret the scene and break both our necks, so we agreed that the most prudent course of action was to leave town immediately.” He squinted at Carl. “Guess we weren’t quick enough.”
“I’ll bet you was talking,” Carl said, his face contorted as he attempted a glower. It came out more like an urgent message from his bladder.
“It may have looked different to you, but—”
“Didn’t look like nothing to me ‘cause I didn’t see nothing. But I got a good imagination.” He tried to tap his temple, but his finger sailed past and jabbed his nose. “Lissen up, you mother—”
“Perhaps someone else saw you through the window?” I suggested.
Drake shrugged. “I didn’t even see the face. Jaylee was—she was facing the window. I was in the bathroom.”
“Any of you gentlemen into Peeping Tom games?” I asked, gazing at Larry Joe, Roy, and Ho (but thinking Larry, Curly, and Moe). “Although Mr. Drake insists he and Jaylee were talking, someone at the window might have mistakenly assumed they were engaged in other pursuits. That might have hurt somebody’s feelings.”
They shook their heads.
I was hoping for an admission of guilt, but it didn’t seem likely so I forged ahead, wishing I knew where I was going. “Jaylee received the letter Monday, which precipitated the plan. Ruby Bee and Estelle threw a party. Drake was all packed and waiting for her when the boys here panicked and decided to move him away from town before I realized what was going on under my nose!” The final sentence heated up along the way, and the glare I turned on Ruby Bee and Estelle was a work of art.
“It was all to save Boone Creek,” Ruby Bee began bravely. “You can’t think I enjoyed trying to run you off, Arly.”
I stared her into silence, then said, “Meanwhile, Jaylee had a private chat with Jim Bob and later went home to load her car. She was also waiting for Jim Bob to show up with a hefty sum of blackmail money so she could afford the cosmetology school and life in the big city. I wonder if he paid her off or tried to brazen it out?” I turned on Mrs. Jim Bob, who was sniveling in the far booth, a pale pink tissue clutched in her hand.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I have no idea where that woman lived, so how would I know if Jim Bob went there to pay her money?”
“Liar!” Estelle chirped, on her feet with her hands on her hips. “While we were on the sofa I found this tissue under the cushion. It’s the same color as yours! That proves you were there.”
Mrs. Jim Bob gasped as if Estelle had flapped a snake in her face. “That’s not mine. She could have bought a box of pink tissues at the store, just like I did.”
“This was the only tissue in the entire mobile home. There wasn’t a box anywhere, because we searched. The mobile home was clean and neat; the tissue couldn’t have been there long.” Estelle advanced with a menacing frown, the tissue held in her fingertips. It would have unnerved me. It almost sent Mrs. Jim Bob into hysterics.
“All right, all right,” she sobbed into her tissue. “I happened to overhear the conversation my husband had with that woman during the party, so after he was gone to meet the other men, I drove over to the slut’s mobile home to beg her to keep her mouth shut. I knew Jim Bob wouldn’t spend a penny to save his reputation—or keep me from being laughed out of the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly.”
“Sister Barbara Anne,” Brother Verber began, rubbing her hand between his own, “you must know I always have had the deepest—”
“Yeah,” she muttered as she yanked her hand free. “Anyway, Jaylee wouldn’t listen to reason or decency; she said she had to have the money or she was going to stop at Ruby Bee’s and shout the news of her impending blessed event, along with the daddy’s name. I gave her the money I’d taken from the store.”
“So you stopped at the Kwik-Screw to rifle the till,” I said. Dahlia hadn’t seen fit to drop that bit of information, but I hadn’t asked. “What time did you go to Jaylee’s mobile home?”
“About nine forty-five, I guess. Afterward, I went to the tabernacle to pray for forgiveness for the sin of stealing. Brother Verber happened upon me, and we knelt in prayer most of the night. It was most uplifting and comforting.”
That seemed to clear them, although I suspected more than pious prayers had been uplifted. I shook Carl’s shoulder. “Wake up so we can talk about your little adventures in Maggody.”
He opened one eye and gave me a pouty look. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, woman.”
I turned to Plover, but he was leaning back in his chair like he’d decided to doze through my muddlings. Rip Van Plover, I snorted to myself before turning back. “We don’t know when Carl arrived in Maggody, but I’d guess it was Monday evening since that’s when he called Hobert Middleton. They had their blackmail conversation around nine o’clock, but Ho had to admit he couldn’t make the payoff until the following morning—today. Ho went to meet the others, and Carl went to the mobile home to wallop Jaylee. Was she there?”
“Naw, she drove off just as I climbed the fence out back,” Carl admitted with a hiccup. “All the food was in the garbage, but I dug it out and ate something afore I went to sleep. Being an escaped convict ain’t easy, you know. You got to keep moving all the time, and watch for the dogs and helicopters, and—” He gave us a befuddled smile, punctuated with another hiccup.
“Right,” I said as I rubbed my chin. It was beginning to look as if none of the Mafia could have killed Jaylee, since she was alive at the time they met behind the Kwik-Screw. I suddenly realized I had an unsightly bulge on my rump and took out the wadded paper that I’d found in the woods. Smoothing it out, I read it under my breath.
“What’s that?” Ruby Bee asked, joining me so she could read over my shoulder. The woman has some irritating habits. “Why, doesn’t that just tug your heartstrings? Poor old Raz is going to have a funeral for Betty at his place, out behind the barn where he buries his animals. It says afterward he’s going to serve dessert so everyone can stay and visit. That is just so sweet.”
I looked at Paulie. “Raz is taking this thing awfully seriously, Officer Buchanon. I sort of feel guilty about it; maybe we ought to try to find the Mercedes owner and get him to buy Raz a new bitch.”
“Sure, Chief. I’ll have motor registration run a list of Mercedes first thing in the morning.” He managed a professional tone, but he didn’t sound real enthusiastic about it. “Do we know what color the car was?”
I looked at him real hard. “You should have seen it when it went through town around ten o’clock. In fact, you should have stopped the car and given the driver a speeding ticket. Kevin Buchanon told Raz the car went through town at seventy miles an hour—why didn’t you ticket it?”
“Maybe I missed it,” he said, flinching as I kept boring into him. “Looked away at the crucial moment.”
“I went through town right fast about that time,” Ho volunteered. “I was damn mad about Carl showing up when
I was occupied with this other mess. I must have been going about sixty.”
“I drove a mite too fast, too,” Larry Joe said. “Joyce tore into me about going to the deer camp, and I was repeating the conversation to myself instead of watching the speedometer.”
Roy raised a finger. “I ran the signal light on the way to meet everybody. It took me longer than I expected to find my socks, and I eased through the light because I didn’t see any police cars parked anywhere around. Damn Mercedes almost ran me off the road.”
“I did, too,” Mrs. Jim Bob said. “I’m usually very careful, but I was halfway through the light before I even saw it, my eyes being fogged with tears and all.”
“Goddamn woman all the time crying.” That was Carl, of course, but he didn’t have a car so we didn’t pay him any mind.
I held out my hand to Paulie. “Let me see the ticket pad, Officer Buchanon. If you were indeed parked near the signal light, you should have written a lot of tickets last night at ten. At least five that we’ve just heard about, to begin with.”
He looked at me with a sad smile. “Guess I wasn’t paying any attention. I was real upset about not passing the state police academy tests. Maybe I was thinking too hard about the future.”
“Who’s future—yours or Jaylee’s? Maybe you were sitting there thinking about how she was off to Little Rock without you. Maybe you were thinking about what you’d seen through the window of Number Three one afternoon. Why’d you go over there?”
“After I showered, I wanted to tell her I might hear something from the state police academy. Her car was parked in back of Ruby Bee’s. I heard some giggles in Number Three. Jaylee saw me in the window and said some right harsh things, so I skedaddled away so she wouldn’t know it was me. I couldn’t ever admit what I saw; she’d have known and hated me afterward.”
“Did you figure out Monday that Jaylee was going to leave town with Drake?”
“I sort of guessed what she aimed to do,” he said in a sulky, childish voice. “I even went by her mobile home to wish her good luck, but I heard Jim Bob in there making wild threats. I went right up to the window and listened while they talked about the baby. It should have been my baby—but she wouldn’t let me touch her. She was all the time telling me she couldn’t because she was married to Carl.”
“Which was a bit perturbing, after seeing her with Drake and then having to listen to her with Jim Bob,” I said sympathetically, hating myself all the while.
“She was screwing everybody but me.” He puckered up like he was about to cry, then caught himself and looked away. “She was screwing them, and she was going to leave Maggody with one of them. She pretended to be upset when I got my letter, but I could tell she was kind of relieved. God, I hated her for that.”
“So when you saw her drive to the motel, you just turned off the radio and followed her, thinking nobody’d ever guess you had left the signal light stakeout?”
He nodded.
“But it wasn’t exactly a spur of the moment thing, was it? You’d stopped at home to pick up the crossbow. You made some fine deductions, Officer Buchanon. You would have made a good officer in the county criminal investigation department if you’d settled for the regular academy.” My eyes clouded with tears. “Damn it, Paulie—”
Plover stopped me and quietly recited the Miranda to Paulie while the rest of us listened in stunned silence, except for Carl who had developed a severe case of the galloping hiccups. After a rousing one he threw up all over the table (did I mention the chitterlings and turnip greens earlier?). At this point the sheriff arrived, along with a herd of deputies. The state troopers were next, with a bunch of customers who’d been hanging around outside. Show time at Ruby Bee’s Bar and Grill, but nobody was in the mood. We all stood around being careful not to look at each other.
16
The show went on most of the night, which was hard since I’d been up since the middle of the previous night. Carl was taken away for a free ride back to Cummins Prison for paperwork; Robert Drake was escorted to the hospital in Starley City. The nurses were going to love him. Paulie was taken away to be booked for homicide. He stopped in front of me to give me a real sad look, and then left between two deputies. The conspirators went over their stories about fifty times, as a group and individually in the back room. Ho got to recite his story extra times, since it was the most interesting one. He, too, was eventually escorted out the door by grimfaced deputies.
The team continued to deplete. After a conference with the sheriff and Plover, I released Larry Joe and Roy but warned them to stay in Maggody until we decided what to do with them. As Roy left, he mentioned rent control, which was probably bribery but sounded okay to me. The sheriff sighed and said they’d keep searching the woods, this time for Mr. Mayor himself, but that it was getting real tedious. I wished them luck.
Mrs. Jim Bob allowed Brother Verber to cling to her elbow as they left for some heavy-dutypraying over their sins—omission and commission.
Ruby Bee brought me a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. It was also bribery, but I was too hungry to point it out to her, and bribery sure wasn’t the worst crime I’d encountered in the last few days. She sat down across from me and watched me wolf down the sandwich, her eyes about as leery as a chicken spotting the stewpot.
“You still mad at me?” she asked when I was through eating.
“Why shouldn’t I be? You committed crimes, lied to your own flesh and blood, got yourself kidnapped by a crazy escaped convict, and managed to utterly humiliate me in your spare time.”
“To save Boone Creek.” She flaired her nostrils at me so I could see how righteous she was. “I told you earlier that I did it so you could swim in your favorite swimming hole, not because I’m some kind of criminal.”
“So your motives were pure.” I sighed. “Just promise me that you won’t ever get involved in something like this again. If you do, I’m going to put you in the drunk tank so fast you’ll be spinning for the next twenty-four hours, rotisserie-style.”
“Estelle and I were trying to help.”
“Just promise and go make some more coffee, okay?” I said wearily. We both knew her promise wouldn’t be worth a plug nickel; she and Estelle watched way too many cop shows. My mother, the boob-tube felon. She promised, I shrugged, and she went so far as to have Estelle cross her heart so I could see how sincere they were.
Plover sat down in the seat Ruby Bee had vacated, his expression as worn out as mine and his whiskers giving his face a blue shadow. “You solved the case. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m going to swap cars. You want to ride back to the compound behind the sheriff’s department?”
“Can’t you find it by yourself ?”
“I can find it by myself,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “I thought you might want to go with me, that’s all. We can stop and have some coffee on the way back.”
Ruby Bee’s Bar and Grill looked dismal in the early-morning light. The plastic booths and bar stools, the dark jukebox, the scattered sawdust on the floor, the long stretch of bar—all of it looked like death warmed over. No honky-tonk, no laughter, no clatter of beer mugs, or girls dancing with their eyes closed. I decided I didn’t want to stay there anymore, and I was too tired to sleep.
“Do I get a piece of pie for breakfast?” I said.
The child with the shoulder-length black hair lay on its belly on the muddy bank, staring at the paper boat as it floated down the creek. When it bobbed out of sight, another was folded from the endless supply in the paper bag and positioned in the water for the launch. Pirate ships, each one, setting off to attack one of those big boats with all the sails and kill everybody.
“Sixteen men on a dead man’s chest,” the child sang under its breath. “Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of hooch.”
Kevin opened the storeroom door, squinting
as the light hit his eyes. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but he reckoned it had to be almost six o’clock. He gaped at the unholy mess in the aisles, then went back to the bed of burlap bags and stroked Dahlia’s cheek until she opened her eyes.
“What’s the matter?” she murmured, giving him a beatific smile that melted his heart like it was vanilla ice cream in July.
He couldn’t bring himself to upset her, not when she looked so warm and contented. “Nothing, my little angel.”
She belched softly and rolled over. After a moment of hesitation, he joined her.
“John?” I said incredulously. “That’s the most boring name in the entire world. There must be seventy million Johns in the country. Do you realize how much energy I expended trying to come up with something a little more intriguing than that? God, ordinary John? Why wouldn’t you admit it before?”
His cheeks turned pink. “Maybe to keep you guessing.”
“It was an effective ploy,” I admitted, turning a little pink myself. “Is this the sort of thing they teach at the state police academy?”
“Not exactly; I suppose I worked this out myself. You’re the first woman chief of police I’ve worked with, and I may have been—well, a bit peremptory, and I want you to know, ah that—”
I took pity on him and interrupted before he fell over his tongue. “I wasn’t too professional at times. If we ever work together on a case in the future, I promise to behave. Scout’s honor.”
“So you’re going to stay in Maggody? I rather picture you on the city streets, rushing from a lecture to a symphony. Neon lights and cocktail parties with the elite …” Plover—no, John— gave me that broad, lazy grin I was growing fond of.