by Craig Rice
“Where in hell was you so long?” she asked. Then she saw the bottles, and her petulant mouth relaxed. She walked down the steps, being very careful not to trip. One heel of her mules was loose and she had to be careful. The grayish pompoms dragged in the dust as she made her way to the camp chair. She had her manicuring set with her and she placed it on the table, leaving room for the bottle and glasses.
“Where’s Mother?” I asked.
Gee Gee tossed a finger toward the burned trailer, and I saw Mother. She was walking with her arm around the woman who had been crying the night before.
“That’s Mrs. Smith,” Gee Gee said. “Her husband died, and she used his insurance money to buy the trailer. She had a beauty shop in it and she traveled around giving permanents and stuff. You know how sympathetic Evangie is? Well, when the poor old dame gets burned out, your mother makes room for her with us. She’s in the front seat of the car for tonight, but Evangie is fixing a place for her in the bedroom.”
Gee Gee didn’t look at me while she was talking. She busied herself with getting the glasses. She put her hand to her mouth, then she bit her thumbnail. Finally she burst out, “Oh, Gyp, I can’t tell you what we been through this morning. Your mother has the whole camp in an uproar. Everybody’s gonna sue. Don’t ask me who they’re gonna sue, but Evangie’s convinced ’em that the city is responsible for the fire, negligence or somethin’. They been holding a council of war since noon.”
Biff opened his mouth to say something. Then he saw Mother and changed his mind.
She was waving gaily as she passed one trailer after another. She stopped at one to inquire about the health of “little Johnny.”
I looked at Gee Gee.
“That’s their kid, and he wouldn’t eat his Pablum until Evangie told him a story.”
Mother’s stories are enough to give little Johnny permanent indigestion. I wondered if she told him the one about the woman throwing her eleven children to the wolves, or the one about the man cutting off his wife’s head with a meat ax. They were Mother’s favorites.
“Does Johnny have a wagon?” I asked Gee Gee.
Gee Gee shrugged her shoulders. She was looking at Mother again. The sun on Mother’s hair brought out the high lights and the sky made her eyes seem bluer than ever.
“No wonder she’s such a spellbinder,” Gee Gee said, as Mother walked toward us.
She was lovely, I thought with pride.
“Where were you dear?” Mother asked happily. Before I had a chance to tell her, she thrust Mrs. Smith under my nose, introduced her, and then whispered, “She’s had so much trouble, Louise. Be nice to her.”
It would have been difficult to be otherwise. Mrs. Smith looked as if she’d had trouble. When she came closer I could see the deep wrinkles on her leathery face, the faded blue of her eyes, the lifelessness of her badly marcelled hair. She couldn’t have been much older than Mother, but as they stood together Mother was radiant in comparison.
I told Mrs. Smith that we were very happy to have her with us until she could find more comfortable quarters, and she burst out crying.
“You’ve all been so wonderful to me,” she sobbed. “I never knew people like you before.”
Mother put her arm around the woman’s thin shoulders. “Now, Mamie, don’t cry. Everything is going to be all right.”
Biff offered the crying woman a drink, but Mother scowled and shook her head. “And you’ve had about enough, too,” she said, leading Mamie into the trailer.
When they opened the screen door, all the dogs started barking at once and Cliff piled out the back door.
“Can’t a guy get any sleep around here?” he complained as he fell into a chair.
“It’s three-thirty. If you wanta sleep, go to a hotel.” Gee Gee pushed a cup of coffee under his face and banged the silver around noisily. “I’ve been trying to clean up in there since twelve this afternoon,” she added.
Gee Gee’s idea of cleaning up was to kick things around until they got lost, but she meant well. Biff usually did the heavy scrubbing. Mother helped me with the cooking. Dimples did the beds, and Mandy was dishwasher. Corny stood around and got in everybody’s way.
He was hung-over but not remorseful. When Biff asked him where he got the load, he said The Happy Hour, and then shut up.
He knew Joyce Janice. They’d played the Eltinge together just a few seasons ago. I thought it rather strange that he didn’t mention seeing her at the saloon. Then I had another idea. It could be that he was too drunk to see anyone. I didn’t ask him about the broken hitch; I knew he’d lie about it regardless. But I did ask him how he found the sheriff.
“He was hanging around the bar, and when I had trouble getting the car started, he said he’d drive me.” Corny went back to blowing on his coffee and finished drinking it before he said, “I thought you might want to see him. I’m sure he’d be interested in what your mother was doing with that shovel last night. Handled it pretty good, too.”
Corny reached for the bottle and poured himself a stiff drink. Then he lit a cigarette and leaned back in the camp chair. He blew a smoke ring and stuck his finger through it.
“It’d look like hell in the papers, wouldn’t it?” he asked quietly.
“What’d look like hell in what papers?” Biff asked.
Corny drank his rye and didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to. I knew the answer.
Corny and Biff started out in burlesque the same season. Corny went straight to the top. He was first comic, Biff was second. Corny got the billing, Biff got nothing. Corny got the salary. Biff got peanuts. Then suddenly Biff’s break arrived. Not just recognition in burlesque, but a made-to-order part in a Broadway show. I knew how Biff’s success rankled in Corny’s heart. I knew, too, that Corny would never be satisfied until Biff was back in burlesque as a second comic.
Biff took my arm firmly. “Come on, Gyps. We’re going to the village again.”
I would like to have put on at least half a face, but with no make-up, my hair in strings, and still wearing the dirty slacks, I allowed myself to be carried off to Ysleta.
Biff didn’t loosen his hold in me until we were off the camp grounds. When we passed the last trailer I took out my compact and tried to do something with my face. It was useless.
“Look, darling,” I said, putting the compact back into my pocket, “I don’t mind having the natives get a preview of how I look when I wake up in the morning, but I would like to know what is the rush. That is, if I’m not being too obstretrical, as Mother would say.”
Biff didn’t even have the courtesy to look at me. With his eyes straight ahead, he replied slowly, “Career or no career, mother-in-law or no mother-in-law, murder is murder. I love your mother. You know that, but …”
“Skip the buildup and give me the meat of the dialogue,” I interrupted.
“Well,” Biff said after he had sulked a little, “you’ll have to admit that Evangie can be difficult at times. If Corny did know anything …”
“If?”
“Yeah, he probably saw Evangie with the shovel heading for the woods. But if he was sure what she was doing, I think he would have come right out and said it.”
We walked on awhile without talking. Then Biff grinned.
“It was kinda cute of her at that. All by herself dragging that putrid old body into the woods and burying it. They don’t make women like that today.”
I should have let it go at that, but not me! Oh no, I’m always in there with my big mouth wide open. I had to tell him about my great-great-grandmother.
“She was a part of the Donner expedition, ya know.”
Biff gave me a “really,” so I went into the story head-first.
“Yeah. They were homesteading and they got lost in the mountains in the winter. Snow and wolves and no food. It must have been terrible. My grandmother was one of the few survivors. Grandpa used to tell me how the scouts found her. She was in a daze, of course, and her ears were frozen, but s
he looked so fat and healthy they couldn’t figure the thing out. By all rights she shoulda been damn near starved to death, lost for over a month like that. But not my great-great-grandmother! When they got her home and undressed her, what do you think they found?”
“I dunno,” Biff said disinterestedly.
“Steaks, all strapped around her body. Human steaks.”
I kept on walking but I peeked at Biff from the corner of my eye. He was still staring straight ahead, so I gave him the blackout. “They recognized one piece of the meat as my Great-great-uncle Louie. They could tell by the tattoo on his hip. It was a picture of the rock of ages. I was named after him; you know, Louie—Louise.”
There was more to the story, but Biff made a dive for the bushes. I waited for him. I thought it was the wifely thing to do. When he came out, he was white around the eyes, so I didn’t tell him about my great-great-grandfather. I suddenly realized I’d better give Biff the family history character by character.
We walked the next half mile silently. Then Biff’s complexion cleared a little. “Real pioneer stock,” he said. “Yep, that accounts for it.”
CHAPTER SIX
We found the sheriff in his office. He was relaxed in a swivel chair, with his feet, in their high-heeled boots, propped up on the roll-top deak. He put down a copy of Variety when Biff and I walked in. Then he stood up to greet us.
“Well, well, I didn’t expect to see you so soon,” he said jovially. He drew out a chair for me and one for Biff. Then he pulled out a bottle from a drawer in his desk. He poured three drinks into paper cups and placed them in front of us.
“First of all,” he said, “we get sociable.”
Biff gulped his drink.
I nursed mine.
“Come on, drink up,” the sheriff said. “You two look like a couple of beat coyotes. Nothing serious enough for such long faces.”
“I’m afraid this is,” Biff said.
“If it’s about the fire, I was fixing to ask you a few questions,” the sheriff said. “Matter of fact, I was going to question you this morning. Then, when I saw that you really were a bunch of actors, I didn’t bother.”
Biff sat on the edge of his chair. His expression was the same as when H. I. Moss would ask him to take a salary cut. Biff always knew he’d agree to the terms, but he liked to be coaxed.
I knew he was going to tell everything, but he wanted to wait for the right moment.
He didn’t have to wait long. The sheriff must have gone to the same school of acting. His timing was beautiful.
“Yep,” he said. “Soon’s I knew you were actors I knew you wouldn’t be mixed up in anything like that.”
“Like what?” Biff asked cautiously.
“Why, that body we found in the woods during the fire,” the sheriff replied, as though we should know all about it. “Shot through the head. Body was in bad shape, too. Dead for a spell, all right.”
I drank my drink on that.
“Yep. Looked like someone poured gasoline on it and then touched it with a match. We’ll be able to identify it, but …”
“Mother wouldn’t do that!” I said.
The sheriff and Biff stared at me. The sheriff in surprise, Biff in annoyance.
“Will you let me tell it, Punkin?” he asked. “You get too involved. And not only that, you keep pulling the blackout too quick.
“This is the way it happened,” Biff said to the sheriff. “Last week we got married. We bought the trailer for our honeymoon. First we send for Evangie so she can go along for the ride. Then we start running into these friends of ours. They’re all going east, and so are we. Plenty of room. So we ask ’em …”
“You ask ’em, you mean,” I said, just in case the sheriff got the wrong idea.
“All right then. I ask them. Anyway, there we are: dogs, monkey, guinea pig, friends, mother-in-law …”
“And,” I interrupted again, “you might give my mother top billing.”
“Bill, our dokkle, has developed an annoying habit of dragging presents into the trailer for us,” Biff said, ignoring me completely. “One day it’s a fish head, next day it’s a bone, then it’s something we can’t name. Anyway, these things have a rare smell to ’em. Evangie’s asthma powder has got a rare smell. Between the mixture, we don’t notice this other smell until we get in Ysleta yesterday. Then the three of us start looking. We naturally think Bill has come up with a prize, but what we don’t expect is what we find.
“Evangie sees it when she opens up the bed in the back room. There’s a tin bathtub under it. We don’t use the tub because we always stop in tourist camps and they have showers. You have to carry a lot of water for that tub business, and it makes the trailer side-heavy. So, we haven’t looked under that bed since we left San Diego. Anyway, Evangie lets the bed fall down and then she locks the doors before she tells us what’s in the tub. I take a look, and sure enough!”
“There it is,” I said.
“The damnedest, deadest body you ever saw.”
The sheriff pinched his chin with a large hand. He looked at Biff from under his bushy eyebrows. “A body, eh?”
“Yep,” Biff said. “When I go to lift it out of the tub, a hunk of the face fell off.”
That’s when I spilled my drink. Biff had promised me he would never mention that again. While I told him what I thought of him for going into all the sordid details when he knew very well how sick it made me, the sheriff began talking to himself.
“That fits, all right,” he said.
Biff had brought my great-great-grandmother into the argument, so I didn’t get the sheriff’s question until he repeated it.
“Did you recognize the body?”
“Oh, sure,” Biff said. “He was our best man.”
The sheriff thought that meant that we had known him all our lives, so we had to go through the whole story of our water-taxi wedding; how we found the best man in a saloon, how we picked up the captain in another saloon, where we got the boat, and everything.
“Never saw him before, eh?”
“Never,” Biff said. “Never saw him after, either. That is, until I lifted up the bed and looked in the bathtub.”
“Except that time in San Diego,” I said firmly.
Biff shook his head. “Gyp swears she saw the guy in San Diego, but the guy we saw didn’t even speak to us. If it’d been George, why he’d have fallen all over us. He was a very pleasant guy.”
“George who?” the sheriff asked.
Biff and I looked at each other. That was the first time I had thought about our best man having a last name.
“We didn’t ask him,” Biff said. “Funny, now that I think it over. You’d think he woulda told us.”
“Yes,” the sheriff said. “Or that you would have asked him. Now, what about those other actors traveling with you? Any of them recognize the body?”
“Oh, we didn’t let them know what we were trouping around with us,” Biff said quickly. “Those two dames would have gone off their nut. Then, too, we thought we should tell the cops first.”
“So you waited a day to do that,” the sheriff said. “In the meantime someone steals the corpse, carries it out to the woods, pours gasoline on it, and sets it afire …”
I knew what was going through Biff’s head. It was going through mine, too. The solution sounded good. We hadn’t said it. The sheriff said it. It he wanted to reconstruct the scene to please himself, why should we break it up?
“No,” Biff said slowly. “Gyp’s mother, Evangie, that is …”
“Mother set fire to the woods.” I said it quickly, before I could change my mind. “Mother did it so she could bury the body. She wouldn’t have poured gasoline on it, though. Mother wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
The sheriff raised an eyebrow. Then he scratched his chin again.
“If anybody but an actor told me a story like that, I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Even with actors, I find it hard to swallow. For instance, why should you
r mother go to all that bother burying a body when none of you knew the corpse? Why not go right to the police and tell the story? Then another thing. How could you stand the smell of a body decaying right under your bed? Why didn’t you ask those four friends of yours about it? And why didn’t you tell me about it this morning when I was out there? How could a woman carry a body like that? What kind of a woman could lift it, let alone carry it almost five hundred feet?”
“She put it in a wagon,” I said. “You didn’t expect her to carry it over her shoulder, did you?” I didn’t realize I had used Mother’s exact words until they were out of my mouth. “It was a neighbor’s wagon,” I added lamely.
“And the reason she didn’t want to tell the police was because she didn’t want Gyp to have all that bad publicity,” Biff said. “Evangie’s got a strange way of justifying things. She figured that as long as we didn’t kill the guy, why should we go through the mess of being suspected maybe. Hell’s bells, the guy was dead. There was nothing we could do about that. Then why tell the bunch that’s traveling with us? Telling them would be like broadcasting it over a national hookup. I’ll be damned if I can explain why we didn’t get wise to the odor, though. It may be because the bathtub adjoins the icebox. There’s only one drain, ya see. Maybe the ice kept the body chilled.”
“In other words,” the sheriff said, “you condone this act of your mother-in-law’s?”
“Not exactly,” Biff replied. “But she is my mother-in-law. I gotta stick by her, don’t I? And she really was doing it for Punkin and me.”
The sheriff got to his feet slowly. He reached over and took his hat from an antler hanging on the wall. “Think you could find the burial place?” he asked me.
“I know the general direction,” I said.
The sheriff looked at Biff and me for a moment. Then he threw open the door. The bright sunlight blinded me. Then I saw the Model T parked in front of us.