“It was about a couple of pimple-headed jerks trying to stick their noses into my business,” the sheriff told her. “And they’re damn lucky I didn't break them!”
With that, he walked back to his private office, slamming the door behind him so hard that a framed certificate of achievement fell off the wall.
Parks gave his friend a few minutes to calm down, then walked into Weber's office and dropped into the seat behind his desk. Neither man said a word for a full minute, then the FBI agent said, “You really have to stop getting all worked up like this, Jimmy. It's bad for your digestion. And when a man can’t digest things, they back up inside him. Pretty soon you could wind up just as full of crap as old Chet there.”
“Screw you,” scowled Weber.
“Ah Jimmy, don’t think I’m not flattered. And yes, it’s crossed my mind too, when I see you first thing in the morning with dragon breath and your eyes full of gunk. But I just don’t think it would work out. I know people talk, but I think this platonic thing we've got going for us has worked out pretty good up ’til now. Besides, no offense, but you're not my type,” said Parks with his boyish grin.
It was hard to stay angry around Parks, and Weber smiled in spite of himself.
“So do you want to talk about it?”
“Fiddle Dee and Fiddle Dumber have decided that since Robyn and I have a personal relationship and I’m her supervisor, they have to take it before the Town Council.
“Ahh, forbidden love,” Parks said, shaking his head ruefully. “I know all about that. Did I ever tell you about my cousin Hazel?”
“No, but I’ve got a feeling you’re about to,” Weber replied, “Even if I don’t want to hear it.”
“She was a good old gal,” Parks reminisced. “Had a bad complexion and she was so skinny that we had to stake her down when the wind blew, but she was just a sweetheart. We was kissing cousins up until the time we got out of high school. ’Course, this was back in Oklahoma, where people are a bit more liberal than you folks are here in Dogpatch. But it was still taboo, and both our Daddies said it had to end, no matter how much in love we were. So I had to say goodbye to that pretty lady, and I joined the Navy. It near about broke both of our hearts.”
“So what ever happened to her?” Weber asked.
“While I was at sea, she married my brother Mike. They own a dry cleaners in Tulsa, and have a houseful of kids. She comes from the Dotson side of the family, and they always were a fertile bunch.”
***
After lunch, Weber, Dolan, and Chad drove back to Zuni Lane and walked around the outside of the Weston house, checking each door and window.
“No evidence of forced entry anywhere,” Chet observed. “How did he get in?”
“I don’t know,” Weber said. “Carl said they were in bed, heard a noise in the living room, and when he went to check it out Chandler was there.”
“Lots of folks around here don’t even lock their doors,” said Chad as Weber unlocked the front door with a key Abby Weston had given him.
The house was just as they had left it the day before. While Dolan dusted the window ledges, kitchen counter, and table for fingerprints, Chad took photos with his digital camera, even though the entire scene had been carefully recorded the day before. Weber stood behind the couch, in front of the bookshelf where Carl had been standing when he shot the intruder.
“Chad, step over there where Chandler was standing when Carl shot him.”
Chad did as instructed, being careful not to step in the bloodstains on the floor.
“How far is it between us?”
“Looks like about fifteen, maybe twenty feet,” Chad said. “Why?”
“Nothing, I guess. Buz said it yesterday, damn good shooting.”
“Well, I’m glad,” Chad said. “Chandler was scum, and nobody’s going to miss him.”
***
They were just locking the door when the dispatcher called to say that there had been a theft in broad daylight, right in town.
“What was stolen?” Weber asked.
“Thomas.”
“Thomas?”
“Yes, Thomas. The turkey? Two guys in a white pickup took him right off his platform. A half dozen people saw them.”
“Jimmy, we’ve really got to put a stop to this crime wave,” Chad said as they walked to their vehicles. “First we’ve got old Harley beating on his neighbor and shooting up the neighborhood, then a home invasion turned deadly, and now Grand Theft Turkey. What’s this town coming to?
“The times, they are a changing,” said Weber, repeating the same observation he had made earlier in the day, out at the Y.
Chapter 8
Thomas the Turkey was Big Lake’s official mascot, a somewhat gaudy work of art created by an itinerant metal sculptor who had enjoyed a brief, but intense, love affair with Delores Drachman, a willowy woman of fifty living on a generous trust fund set up by her grandfather, who had made his fortune in peppermint candy somewhere back east. Tired of his granddaughter scandalizing the family name, starting from a very young age, he had banished her to the far side of the country after a particularly unpleasant incident. She and a chauffeur were found in a compromising position in the back seat of a guest’s Bentley limousine, during a garden party to celebrate his 70th birthday, ruining the entire celebration.
Many people in Big Lake felt that if the town really needed a mascot, it should be something like a bear or an elk, both of which lived in the nearby forest. Or even an eagle. Several bald eagle nests could be found in the area, and more than one fisherman who had spent a fruitless day on the lake was chagrined to see one of the big birds swoop down over the water and effortlessly pluck out a trout for dinner.
But a turkey? Sure, there were plenty of wild turkeys wandering the slopes of Cat Mountain, but the damned things were ugly! Why a turkey?
The answer was simple. Delores’s sculptor lover had an affinity for turkeys for some reason, and when the town needed funding for a library but couldn’t find room in its budget, Delores made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Allow her to commission a sculpture of a turkey for the town’s mascot and she would write a check to cover the cost of the bookshelves, counters, computers, and even enough books to fill the doublewide mobile home that would serve as the new library.
Those who opposed the idea of a turkey for a town mascot were even more disgruntled at the unveiling ceremony two months later, when it was revealed that Thomas wasn’t even a wild turkey, just a typical barnyard turkey. Or at least his creator’s idea of what a turkey would look like, if it was five feet high and made of copper plates hammered into shape and braised together. There was a collective groan from the crowd, which greatly displeased the artist, who was already fed up with Delores’s clinginess and demanding ways.
It was just the excuse he had needed to throw a tantrum, declare that these uncouth pioneers did not deserve his work, and stomp off in the direction of San Diego, never to be seen again. Delores was heartbroken and beyond consolation for almost a week, then she began an affair with a young man named Herbert, a stained-glass artist she discovered at a craft fair in Flagstaff. Herbert moved into her elaborate home in one of Big Lake’s new developments. Thomas the Turkey was left standing in front of the new library, a testament to love gone wrong, or maybe just how flakey the very rich can be.
***
“Well, he’s gone, alright,” Weber said as he and his deputies stood in front of the square concrete platform that once held the metal turkey.
“We saw the whole thing,” said Constance LeBeer, a retired minister from Fresno, and several older women with her all nodded their heads in unison. “Our book club was meeting in the library and these two men pulled up in a white truck and started doing something to the statue. At first we thought that they were workers doing some kind of maintenance, but the next thing we knew, they lifted it off its pedestal and just threw it into the back of their truck and sped away, squealing their tires as they went. That’s
when we realized a crime had been committed!”
Inez Fleischman, who had come to Big Lake a year ago, nodded vigorously in agreement. Inez was a recent widow from Las Vegas, where her husband was rumored to have been a poker dealer who met an untimely end when the casino he worked for caught him dealing off the bottom of the deck and feeding winning cards to an accomplice. Details were sketchy on what happened next, but Inez never attended the bingo games that Sylvia Willits and her sister Margaret were so fond of.
“Yes,” added Beatrice MacBride, a tiny bird of a lady who had moved into the Acorn Assisted Living Center the past winter but refused to allow old age or the infirmities that went with it to slow her down one bit. At 83, Weber had no doubt that Beatrice could probably outwork any of the Acorn’s employees who were supposed to be helping her. “Just look at those marks on the street. No town employee would do such a thing!”
Weber looked at the twin strips of rubber left when the truck peeled away and refrained from saying that it had only been a few weeks since he had caught Deputies Dolan Reed and Buz Carelton drag racing their police cars on Main Street in the wee hours of a boring Wednesday morning.
“Are you going to catch the thieves, or just stand here all afternoon twiddling your thumbs?” Meredith Zdenek demanded to know.
“Yes ma’am, Weber said. “Dolan, will you ask these nice ladies to give you a full description of the suspects? I don’t suppose any of you got the license number of the truck, did you?”
“Of course not,” Meredith replied, “none of us have teenage eyes anymore! It was just two men. I don’t know what they looked like. Who notices things like that? Can’t you make a plaster cast of the tire marks and run it through the FBI’s computer system? I think I saw somewhere that tire treads are as unique as fingerprints.” Meredith was a huge fan of CSI-type television shows.
Weber was tempted to tell her that one could not make plaster casts of tire marks on pavement, and that by now Thomas the Turkey had probably been cut up and sold for scrap. He knew that Meredith would never accept such an answer, so instead he said, “You’re right, Meredith, and since we have our own resident FBI agent in town, I’ll turn this over to Special Agent Parks. I’m sure he’ll bring the full resources of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into this. After all, kidnapping is a federal crime.”
“Even if it’s just a statue of a turkey?” Constance LeBeer asked skeptically.
“I’m pretty sure once you name a sculpture it becomes a legal entity,” Chad piped in. “I think they made that a law back when Clinton was President.”
“Oh, that man! I won’t even discuss his lack of morals,” said Constance. “Come ladies, we still have the second half of Atlas Shrugged to discuss and the library closes in thirty minutes.”
***
Before calling it a day, Weber stopped at the offices of the Big Lake Herald to give editor Paul Lewis a recap of recent police activities in time for the weekly edition. But before he could, Margie Shores accosted him.
“So what’s with Big Lake’s most eligible bachelor today?” the newspaper’s receptionist demanded to know. “How come you haven’t married that nice lady deputy of yours and made an honest woman out of her yet, James Weber?”
With the encounter with Mayor Wingate and Councilwoman Smith-Abbot earlier in the day still fresh in his mind, Weber said, “Don't even ask.”
“What? I thought women with handcuffs turned you on?”
Weber grinned at her and said, “You have a very dirty mind, did you know that?”
“Yes, I know,” sighed Margie, “all this potential just sitting here going to waste.”
Weber patted his longtime friend on her ample rump as he made his way past, and Margie warned, “Don't write checks you’re not ready to cash, Buster!”
“You know I love you, Margie.”
“Yeah, if I only had a pair of handcuffs! Come to think of it, I think I do!”
“Okay, that's more than I need to know,” Weber told her. “Is Paul hiding back there?”
“He’s probably asleep at his desk,” Margie said. “Go back there and tell him to get to work.”
Weber made his way back to Paul's office, where the pudgy newspaperman was pounding away at a keyboard on a desk overloaded with piles of papers, correspondence, notes, and magazines.
“Damn, Paul, I love coming here. Your desk is even worse than mine!”
“So what do you have for me today?” the newspaper editor asked him. “More murder and mayhem hopefully? If not, I'll settle for sordid sex and miscellaneous mischief.”
“Well, you already know about the shooting at the Weston house, and I think your receptionist is responsible for most of the sordid sex going on in Big Lake.”
Paul laughed and pushed his keyboard away. “I'll tell you what, Jimmy, I think you're missing the boat there. The gal’s got a lot of love to give.”
“What was that line from the old Dirty Harry movie?” Weber asked, “A good man knows his limitations?”
Paul laughed again and then asked, “Anything new on the shooting?”
“Looks pretty simple to me, Paul. The guy picked the wrong people to mess with and got himself shot for his trouble.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Is that all there is to it? I’ve known you since we were both knee high to a grasshopper, Jimmy, and it seems like something’s troubling you.”
“Oh, I've always got something troubling me,” Weber told him. “I just keep asking myself… why Big Lake? How does an escaped convict with a long rap sheet find himself in Big Lake facing an old guy with a gun? Why not Albuquerque, or Denver, or Tucson? Why Big Lake?”
“I ask myself that every week Jimmy, after the paper hits the street and I do the books. Why Big Lake? I could be in the nation’s capital exposing corruption instead of here writing about what they had for lunch at the Senior Center, or whose cat got stuck in a tree.”
“You’d never fit in with all those big city people,” Weber told him. “Face it Paul, you and me are small town boys. Always have been, always will be. But just to make your day, I got a scoop for you. Somebody stole Thomas the Turkey.”
“Thomas? You mean that stupid sculpture in front of the library?”
Weber nodded. “Yep. In broad daylight. Couple of guys in a white pickup pulled up in front of the library and threw it in the back of the truck and took off.”
“Wasn't the damn thing nailed down or something?” Paul asked.
“There were a couple of bolts sunk into the concrete holding it down, but they just took the nuts off and were gone.”
“Kids maybe?”
“The Ladies Book Club saw the whole thing, and they said it was two men,” Weber told him. “I'm thinking old Thomas is going to be melted down for scrap. My problem is, I don't know whether to investigate and arrest the guys, or have the Town Council give them an award for beautification.”
Chapter 9
Weber was seated in a booth in the back of the ButterCup Café the next morning, watching Parks work his way through a massive stack of buttermilk pancakes.
“It’s amazing. He never even comes up for breath,” observed Paul Lewis.
“I told you so,” Weber said to his boyhood friend. “And he can do that all day long.”
The FBI agent ignored them as he picked up a piece of bacon and munched on it to give his mouth something to do while he speared another oversized bite of fluffy pancakes.
“And he’s doing this while he’s on a diet,” Weber said. “Imagine him on a normal day!”
“I’ve heard about these kinds of things, but I never really believed it was true,” the newspaperman said. “I always put it in the same category as those urban legends like Bigfoot and politicians’ campaign promises.”
“It makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?”
Parks ignored them and spooned a pile of scrambled eggs into his mouth.
“I hear tell that his grandpappy was a
West Virginia coal miner who was trapped in a cave-in,” Weber said. “They brought in drills and cranes, but he was buried so deep they couldn’t get to him, so finally they just filled in the hole and left him there. But a couple of weeks later he showed up at home for supper and told his wife he just ate his way to the surface.”
“I believe it,” Paul said. “It’s ….”
Before he could finish his thought, Weber’s attention was drawn to a loud disturbance up front near the counter.
“Where is he? I’m going to whip his ass when I see him…”
“You’ll have to go through me first!”
“No problem. I can do that right here and right now, if that’s the way you want it!”
Expecting the problem to be a couple of rowdy loggers, or maybe flatlanders with no sense of decorum, he was surprised when he stood up and saw two of his own deputies squaring off in the middle of the crowded diner.
“Hey, it takes two to tango,” Buz said loudly, “So don’t you go putting this all on Billy!”
“Are you calling my little girl a slut?” Dolan Reed demanded. “I’ll wring that scrawny neck of yours, you son-of-a…”
Dolan was swinging a roundhouse right as he spoke, connecting with the side of the taller man’s head and knocking him sideways into Brady Lothrup, who was seated at the counter finishing his breakfast. Buz pushed himself off the startled insurance agent and charged Dolan, grappling with him and trying to pin his arms at his sides before he could swing again. At the same time, he head-butted the other deputy and a spray of blood erupted from Dolan’s nose.
The two men struggled and crashed into a booth where five members of the Big Lake Chickadees, the local bird watching club, were having their monthly breakfast meeting. Angela Templeton, wife of Town Councilman Kirby Templeton, was shoved sideways into Margaret Adamczak, who was just raising a glass of orange juice to her lips. Both women screamed as they were splashed when the glass was knocked out of Margaret’s hand.
“Stop it. Stop!” Weber yelled as he rushed to the scene of the fight. He pulled the two men upright from where they still wrestled on top of the table, in a gooey mess of egg yolks, oatmeal, and pancake syrup. He managed to get Dolan off of Buz and handed him off to Parks, who locked the man up in a bear hug from behind. Buz scrambled to his feet and went after his fellow deputy, but the sheriff blocked his path. “Stop right now Buz, it’s over!”
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 163