by B K Baxter
“A lot of rumors have been flying around town, and I’ve heard your name tossed around a time or two.”
Jimmy let out a grunt as he replaced the filter. Then he wiped his hands on a shop rag and gave me an angry look. “That’s ridiculous. Just because someone dumped Tabby here doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it. Besides, the cops already arrested that mentally challenged kid from the grocery store.”
I restrained myself from defending Stanley. “Some folks don’t think he could do it. They think it must have been someone closer to her, someone with whom she had a history.”
“I know what the people around here say. That I was running around with her behind Vince’s back. It’s not true. Once she got with Vince, I wouldn’t touch her.”
“Is it true she left you for him?” I tried to ask the question in a neutral tone, but it still felt intrusive. I wasn’t used to performing an interrogation.
“Yes,” he said, scowling. “Tabby was a wild child. I should’ve known she was cheating on me. But I loved her, as dumb as that was, and it came as a shock when she dumped me for that old fart.” He held up his hand, showing off the tattoos I had noticed earlier. “These used to be her name. Had them covered up on the same night she married Vince.”
I believed him. Sincerity rang from his voice. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t still have killed her. People kill the things they love all the time.
“Love isn’t like a switch, something you can turn on and off. Are you sure you didn’t have any lingering feelings for her?”
“Sure. Maybe. I don’t know.” He threw down the rag and let out a breath. “Maybe for a while, but I wasn’t seeing her again. Once bitten is twice shy for me.”
“And yet her body still showed up in this garage.”
“I got an alibi, and I already told the sheriff about it. I was over Tabby, and I’m seeing someone new. So whatever evil thoughts you have in your head, lady, it wasn’t me!”
I nodded, wondering who The Hunk was making time with now. Before I could ask, he let out a string of curses. “People been in and out of the garage all week, asking me these same hateful questions. I didn’t kill my ex-girlfriend!”
I held up my hands and lowered my voice, hoping to calm him down. “I understand, and I’m sorry if I upset you, but if you aren’t the one responsible, Tabby’s body being found here is even more suspicious. It’s almost like someone was trying to set you up. Is there anyone who would want to pin a heinous crime on you?”
His laugh was cynical. “How should I know? I didn’t think I had any enemies, but the way everyone is treating me now, I can’t tell who to trust.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. Putting my hand on his arm, I backed off on the interrogation. “This must be very difficult.”
“You have no idea.”
I was about to ask him about his alibi, but I didn’t get a chance. Scar charged out of the service office, his voice booming across the garage. “It’s just a dang oil change. You should be done by now.”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant,” Jimmy said, his voice weary.
“Watch it with the disrespect, boy. If I was your sergeant, you’d be cleaning the latrines with a toothbrush. Finish up and get on the Chevy that was supposed to be ready yesterday.”
“I can’t help it that every busybody in town wants to crowd in here and get a look at the crime scene!” Jimmy’s frustration was palpable.
Scar, however, wasn’t affected by his employee’s complaint. “If you’d been here working late on the Chevy that night like you were supposed to be, then you wouldn’t have had to worry about your ex being found dead in my garage.”
“Something came up,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah. Another skirt to chase.” Looking down at me, Scar jerked his head in the direction he’d just come. “Let’s go inside and settle up, ma’am. You can flirt with him on his own time.”
“I wasn’t flirting with him,” I said, but Scar was already walking away, expecting me to follow. I looked back at Jimmy, but he was focusing on the car. I hurried after the sergeant, not wanting to make him any angrier than he already was.
Back at the service desk, I watched as Scar wrote up the paperwork by hand. The phone rang, but he ignored it this time.
“Pretty busy around here,” I said, just to fill the awkward silence between him.
Scar grunted. “You’re not the first single female who gets all tingly flirting with the handsome murder suspect.”
“Oh, I wasn’t. I wasn’t flirting. I’m actually trying to help my friend, Stanley Lane. He’s been wrongly accused of this crime and I—”
“You work for the Sheriff’s Department?”
I blinked. “Uh, no.”
“The District Attorney’s office then?”
“No. I’m a librarian.”
His stone-faced expression didn’t need a verbal accompaniment. He handed me the paperwork and showed me where to initial. I handed him my credit card, feeling like all kinds of moron.
“Still, Stanley is my friend, and if I can find out anything that could help him out, I’m going to try.” Screwing up all my courage, I decided to go for it. “Do you—uh, that is—what are your thoughts on—”
He looked at me and ran my card. “I don’t have an opinion. That girl was fast and loose. And Jimmy out there ain’t a white-knight type. He didn’t like the fact that she was going behind his back with Vince. Almost cost me a fortune when Vince brought in his Porsche and dummy out there screwed up the wiring, probably on purpose.”
He handed me back the card and sighed. “Still, Jimmy is more vacuous than vicious, and I don’t think he could have had anything to do with Tabby’s demise.”
“You think he was over her?”
“I think he started seeing someone new. Jimmy ain’t the type you can keep down for long. Short attention span. He forgets to stay mad at you.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Any idea who this mystery woman is?”
Scar shook his head. “No clue.”
The door to the service office opened and Jimmy walked in, handing me my keys. “I pulled her around front for you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Please tell your boss that my oil was dirty enough to come back again.”
Jimmy’s puzzled expression was adorable, and I managed to get a laugh from Scar, so I counted myself as ahead for the day.
As I steered in the direction of home, I went over what I’d learned. Jimmy seemed like a straight shooter, or at least he was good at playing dumb, because I didn’t see him as someone able to pull off the kind of logistics Tabby’s murder and crime-scene staging would have required. Still, there were a couple of red flags that made it so I couldn’t eliminate him from my list.
For one, Scar said he’d screwed up the wiring on Vince’s Porsche. While it could have been an accident, Scar hadn’t seemed to think so. Fooling around with a car’s wiring sounded dangerous. Maybe he had been banking on it causing a malfunction that could lead to a crash or worse.
And the mystery woman. Apparently, she was Jimmy’s alibi. But who was she? The way gossip burned through New Orleans like wildfire, I would have expected it to be common knowledge by now. The fact that it wasn’t meant he was hiding something.
I had to find out who the mystery woman was. Or if she even existed.
Chapter 16
“You’re following too close! He’s going to see us.”
I frowned. “You could have driven!” I was trying to stay two car-lengths behind, but New Orleans was small, and the lack of traffic wasn’t cooperating.
“He knows my car better,” she said. “Besides, I needed my hands free to give these donuts the attention they deserve.”
I let out a snicker. Char was obsessed with her snacks. I didn’t know how she stayed so trim. Good genes, I supposed.
“He’s turning,” she said, her energetic expression making powdered sugar fly off her lips. “Don’t miss the turn!”
“I won’
t!” I couldn’t help myself. I dissolved into giggles.
We’d decided that the best way to figure out the identity of the mystery woman was to run surveillance on Jimmy. Our plan was to tail Jimmy when he left the garage and see where he went. Which was why we were currently following behind him, my co-pilot yelling out random directions while she plowed through the donuts we’d brought along for the ride.
Before long, we discovered Jimmy was headed home. Home just happened to be the same trailer park where Tammy lived.
“Must have been convenient for the lovebirds in high school,” Char commented.
I parked down the street so as to not raise suspicions, and we sat tight for an old-fashioned stakeout. In less than an hour, the bulk of the donuts had disappeared. By hour two, we were bored enough to play I Spy. We’d just passed the three-hour mark when there was a commotion from the backseat.
Chonks leapt suddenly into the front seat, scaring the bejesus out of us both.
“Where the heck did you come from?” I hugged him to me and lifted him so I could see his expression. “You’re supposed to be at home. What part of ‘indoor cat’ do you not understand?”
The cat let out a lazy mewl, unimpressed by my questioning. I set him down, and he immediately lashed his tail right under Char’s nose, making her sneeze. Char reached for her purse, digging inside to locate her allergy medicine. As she popped a pill into her mouth, Chonks jumped on her lap, knocking the bottle to the floor.
The crazy cat leapt after the bottle, batting it around on the floor of the car.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to grab it from him as he kicked it over to my side of the floorboard. “He’s an unrepentant rascal who refuses to behave like a gentleman, no matter what I do.”
I managed to pry the bottle away from Chonks, who’d grabbed it and hugged it to his chest like a linebacker with a football. Holding it up, I realized the prescription had been filled at Mercer’s pharmacy.
Nothing surprising about that. The entire town probably gets its prescriptions from Mercer.
I passed the bottle back to Char, who returned it to her purse, much to Chonks’s displeasure. He let out an angry yowl, and I told him he had to behave himself if he was going to join our stakeout.
My bladder had just given me the signal that it wouldn’t be tolerating the situation for much longer when a car finally approached Jimmy’s trailer. Its lights were off, which was suspicious enough, and it pulled up to a stop just long enough for a passenger to jump out and rush up the steps to the trailer.
“I don’t know whose car that is,” Char remarked. Then she noted a rideshare logo in the back window. The trailer door opened and the figure ducked in, the door shutting tight afterward.
“Could you tell who it was?” I asked Char, but she shook her head, and I admitted that I couldn’t either. “What do we do now?”
“Well, we know they’re in there. We could sneak up and peek in the windows, see if we can see who’s in there that way.”
My eyes widened. Following someone in my car was one thing, but creeping up to the windows and looking inside seemed like going too far. “Are you serious?”
Char nodded. “This is desperate measures time. We have zero evidence, and it won’t be long until the trial gets moving. And since I doubt Taz is going to testify, the trial isn’t going to last very long. If we’re going to get him out of jail, we’re going to have to take a risk.”
I closed my eyes, gathering my courage. “Okay. We find out who it is, and then we go.”
“Right.” Char opened her door and climbed out.
I turned around to where Chonks had climbed into the spot beneath the rear window. “You stay put and be quiet.”
Chonks gave me the look of a child claiming innocence while standing in a pile of opened presents on Christmas morning. I shook my head and got out of the car. My heart was pounding, my palms clammy. I shoved my hands into my pockets and jogged after Char, who was already approaching the trailer.
It was a rectangle with windows on the far end that were covered in cheap white blinds. Although they were lowered, the edges of the plastic had turned up on one of them, enough to get a look inside.
Pressing my face to the window, I peered into what turned out to be a bedroom, and not a particularly tidy one. Clothes were cast around the floor on thick brown carpet that could disguise a multitude of sins. An unmade bed, a nightstand littered with candy wrappers and half-empty sports drink bottles, and a poster of a nearly naked female on a sunny beach completed the picture.
I shook my head at Char and we moved around to the back of the trailer. The first window we came on was narrow and frosted, likely the bathroom. Moving down to the next window, I narrowly avoided tripping over the remains of some kind of car exhaust system.
Char had ducked under the window, waiting for me to catch up. Dingy curtains hung to either side, the center part bare. Char held up her fingers, counting down 3-2-1, and we both crept upward to steal a simultaneous glance inside.
It was the kitchen. Like the bedroom, it was less than pristine. We only risked a quick glance before ducking again, but as neither of us had seen anyone, I risked a longer look. There was a sink full of dishes, a small table piled with mail, and counters piled with paper bags, empty cups, and the other debris of a bachelor pad.
Char put her hand on my arm, grabbing my attention. She jerked her thumb at the next window that was a few feet down. I nodded and followed her, giving a wide berth to the jumble of lawn implements left leaning against the side of the trailer.
This window had a set of gauzy white curtains that were fading to a dull yellow after years of sun bleaching. They were pulled across the entire window, but they were transparent enough to see through them for the most part. Char did her countdown and we slowly crept from under the window to peer inside.
The view this time was of the living room, and directly across from the window we stood before was the couch. Two figures were sitting there, and I reflexively ducked, holding my chest because I thought my heart was going to leap out of it.
Char rolled her eyes at me, then motioned for me to look again. Creeping upward a second time, I stayed long enough to realize who was sitting on the couch next to Jimmy.
“That’s Mercy Means,” I hissed in Char’s ear. “Vince’s ex-wife.”
“I know,” she whispered back. “What is she doing here? Could they be plotting together?”
“Maybe. I’m going to get a better look.” I took a couple of steps to the left, trying to see past a fold in the fabric. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten about the pile of lawn tools.
My foot hit half the tines on a rake, making it shoot forward and disturb the other equipment piled there. With a loud racket, they tumbled against the trailer before hitting the ground. A dog two trailers down started barking like crazy, adding to the chaos.
I stood there, eyes wide, hands clapped over my mouth, a look of shock on my face that would be comical if the situation wasn’t so critical. Char slapped her hand against her forehead and grabbed my hand. “Come on. We gotta run.”
We dashed back toward the street, but before we could reach the end of the trailer, Jimmy came around the corner, a pair of nunchucks in his right hand.
“Hey!” he shouted. Then his jaw dropped.
“Dr. Rains? Is that you?” His eyes flashed to me. “And you were in the shop yesterday.”
“Hi,” I said lamely.
The neighbor’s outside light flashed on, and Jimmy scowled. “Y’all better come inside before you get the whole park going.”
I felt like a recalcitrant child, walking with my head down as I followed Jimmy into the trailer. Mercy let out a gasp when she saw us, jumping to her feet. “What are they doing here?”
“I was just about to find that out,” Jimmy said.
I shrugged, trying to pretend it was no big deal. “We learned you were seeing someone new. A mystery woman. We followed you home and waited to see if we could find out
who that mystery woman was.”
Jimmy shook his head as if my explanation wasn’t sinking in, but Mercy scowled. “You followed him?! What business is it of yours who he dates?”
“We’re just trying to help Taz,” Char replied. “He didn’t kill Tabby. We’re trying to figure out who did.”
“I thought your brother was the sheriff,” Mercy retorted. She turned to me. “And I thought you got enough at the bazaar. You still think I killed Tabby?”
Jimmy turned to her. “You, babe? This chick came into my garage asking me if I killed Tabby.” He turned to me. “How could you think Mercy did it? That’s screwed up.”
I raised my hands to calm things down. “We’re just trying to figure out what happened that night. Tying up loose ends.”
“She couldn’t have murdered Tabby, and neither could I,” Jimmy said. “We spent that night together. Met up at a hotel over in Laplace after your little book club.” He glanced at Char. “And I already told your brother the sheriff the same thing. Mercy gave him the damn hotel receipt. He had the decency to say he’d be discreet. Looks like I can’t trust you two to do the same.”
Mercy fell back against the couch, her hand over her face. “I knew it was just a matter of time before word got out that we were together.”
“Why are you guys even bothering to sneak around?” I asked. “You’re both single. Why not just date openly?”
“For one, there’s the age difference,” Mercy said, brushing her bangs off her face. “It might not matter if a man Vince’s age dates a girl Tabby’s age, but me dating Jimmy isn’t going to be judged by the same standard. Not here in New Orleans.”
“Who cares what people say?” Char said. “They’ll get over it eventually.”
“It’s not that easy,” Mercy said. “Vince is trying to take my alimony away, saying I was already seeing Jimmy before we were divorced. It’s a lie, but I did start seeing Jimmy not long after the divorce was final. And the way Vince is, I wouldn’t put it past him to manufacture evidence showing I was having an affair. Or heck, just find a judge he could pay off.”