Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  The sheriff shook his head. “You’re in the wrong business, Doc. You should be writing those detective stories.”

  “Truth is stranger than fiction, Sheriff. Two nights ago the final specimen emerged from its puparium, and Teddy called to let you know; the poor guy was actually naive enough to cooperate with you. There could only be one reason to make a fuss over that last specimen—it must have been indigenous to some other area, verifying our suspicions that the body had been moved. But there was only one fly, and Teddy was the only one who knew about it. So you sent poor Teddy home, then released the fly—and left the door open to make it look like an accident. And then, for the coup de grâce, you somehow made it to Teddy’s trailer ahead of him and waited. Very tidy; no evidence, and now no witness.”

  Nick began to slowly shake his head. “But the thing I find incredible—the one real shining moment in all of your pathology—is when you put a bullet in the face of an innocent old woman just to help cover your tracks. Her death wasn’t even essential. You could have gotten away with Teddy’s murder without it. It was that extra little touch that shows what a truly demented individual you are.”

  The sheriff said nothing at all for a moment. Then he began to smile and finally laughed outright.

  “So that’s your story?” he said through his laughter. “If I spent all that time at your lab that night, how could I beat your partner to his trailer? And how could I murder your partner and poor old Mrs. Gallagher if I was with Jenny the whole night? And most of all, why would I want to kill my own best friend? Why would I need to? To win Kath? I’ve been first in line for Kath ever since Andy. It was never about Jimmy, Doc.”

  “There are still a few missing pieces to the story,” Nick said. “I don’t suppose you’d care to help me with the details?”

  “What are you going to do with a cockamamie story like that? You’ve got no evidence or witnesses at all. You think you can take a fairytale like that to the law?”

  Nick smiled and leaned forward. “I’m not a fool either, Sheriff. The evidence is gone—you’re in no danger from the law. The only way I can hurt you, the only thing that really matters to you, is if I can sell my story to Mrs. Guilford.”

  The sheriff stopped abruptly. He stood silently for several moments, expressionless once again, and then he began to smile once more.

  “You hang on like a tick. I got to give you that. She must be paying you a fortune.”

  Nick shook his head. “This isn’t about money. This is for Teddy.”

  “Go ahead,” the sheriff shrugged. “Try to sell your story to Kath. There’s one piece of the equation you’re overlooking, Doc: You’re the outsider here. She’s known you for, what—a week now? Kath and I grew up together. She loves me.”

  “Like a brother,” Nick needled.

  “Maybe so—but that still makes me the brother and you the blind geek from Pittsburgh. Who do you think she’s going to believe?”

  “You, of course. Unless.”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless one of those missing pieces turns up.”

  “So long, Doc.” The sheriff waved. “I’ll be seeing you around.”

  Nick gazed after him as he moved away. “I’ll be watching for you.”

  Nick headed slowly across the churchyard, the sheriff’s questions kept returning to him.

  How could the sheriff murder Teddy and Mrs. Gallagher if he was with Jenny McIntyre all night? Was he really at Jenny’s, or was it just an empty alibi? He must have been there at least part of the night—the story would be too easy to check out. But if the sheriff came and went during the night, Jenny would certainly know. Would she lie to protect him—maybe to win him away from Kathryn?

  He approached the picnic table lost in thought when the glint of sunlight from something on the table caught his eye. Beanie stood beside the table like a towering totem with a band of tiny worshipers gathered about him. The deputy held them back from the table with his trunklike arms. The children were oohing and aahing over Beanie’s police sidearm, shining in the hot afternoon sun.

  “Don’t touch,” Beanie said with great authority. “Everybody look, but don’t touch.”

  Nick stepped closer and peered over the heads of the solemn assembly. “What kind of gun do you have there, Deputy?”

  “A police gun,” Beanie said proudly.

  “It looks a little like the sheriff’s gun.”

  “ ’Zactly like Unca Pete’s gun.”

  It was exactly like the sheriff’s weapon—a 9 millimeter Beretta 92F, the civilian equivalent of the standard army sidearm. They were identical except for the absence of the engraved emblem of the All American Division.

  “I think Uncle Pete’s gun is bigger.”

  “ ’Zactly the same!” Beanie repeated with obvious irritation.

  Fifty yards away and thirty feet in the sky, a single black Calliphora vomitoria hovered in the breeze, head into the wind, sensing and sampling the air as it rushed past. Suddenly, the blow fly detected an airborne cluster of blood molecules—and then another. She eagerly followed the elusive scent forward, drifting down from cluster to cluster, the scent leading it irresistibly onward until it finally came to rest on the handgrip of the deputy’s gun.

  Nick spotted the fly even before it landed. “That’s enough,” Beanie said. “I got to put it away now.”

  “No!” Nick grabbed his arm as he reached for the gun. “Tell me more about your gun, Beanie. Do you ever get to use it?”

  The fly wandered over the serrated grip, its extended proboscis in constant motion—probing, sensing, tasting.

  “Can’t talk about that.” Beanie shook his head.

  “Do you ever clean it? You can tell me that.”

  “I wipe it off sometimes.”

  The sun bore down on the gleaming chrome pistol, and the metal grew steadily warmer. The fly worked its way slowly over the Beretta, first to the trigger guard, then the frame, then the slide, its senses leading it inerrantly toward the muzzle of the gun.

  “But do you ever really clean it? Take it apart? Clean the barrel?”

  Beanie shook his head. “Wipe it off, mostly. Makes it shiny.”

  Nick held his breath as the fly hesitated for a moment at the very tip of the muzzle—then disappeared into the deep blackness of the barrel.

  Nick stood paralyzed, watching as Beanie carefully picked up the weapon and slid it neatly back into its leather holster—exactly as he had done two nights ago after firing a bullet into the base of Teddy’s skull.

  Nick turned and drove his right fist into the center of Beanie’s face. The nasal bone shattered beneath the blow, and blood spurted from both nostrils. The children scattered like startled doves. Beanie staggered backward from the force of the blow, and Nick was on him like a spider on a fly, driving his massive body to the ground with a thundering whump. With his left hand he grabbed for Beanie’s bulbous throat, and he brought his right fist back for a crushing blow—and then he stopped. For one split second he met Beanie’s eyes, and there he saw … nothing. There was neither malice nor anger nor cruelty of any kind. There was nothing but confusion and sorrow and pain. They were not the eyes of a killer—they were the eyes of a little child. Nick lowered his fist. In his rage at the puppet master, he had attacked the puppet.

  He felt an explosion of pain in his left side, and the force of the blow threw him off of Beanie and onto his back. His wind was completely gone, and he writhed on the ground in agony, staring into the searing white sky above. The figure of the sheriff stood towering over him, the blinding sun flashing out from behind him like light from the face of Moses. An instant later he felt Kathryn’s body drop across his like an interceding angel—covering him, protecting him.

  “Stop it, Peter!” she screamed. “You didn’t have to kick him that hard!”

  “Look at Beanie!” he shouted back. “I should have shot him!”

  Beanie stood calmly a few feet away, hands on knees, blood draining freely from his n
ose.

  “Nick doesn’t know what he’s doing! He hasn’t slept for days!”

  “He knows what he’s doing, all right. He knows exactly what he’s doing!”

  The sheriff circled menacingly around Nick’s body while Kathryn stretched out over him, keeping her body between him and the avenging angel above.

  “He’s under arrest!” he jabbed his finger at Nick’s body.

  “Leave him alone! He’s had enough!”

  “He assaulted an officer of the law!”

  “He hit Beanie. Don’t be so stupid, Peter! Whose side are you on?”

  “Not his!”

  Kathryn rose up to her knees now and put her hands on her hips. There was an unmistakable fire in her emerald eyes. “Then how about my side? You always say you’re on my side, Peter, well how about it? For me?”

  Peter scowled at her and cursed under his breath. “Get him out of here,” he growled, “and keep him away from me!” He turned and stormed off, leaving the deputy still doubled over behind him.

  Kathryn immediately began to drag Nick to his feet. “We’d better get out of here before he changes his mind.”

  He put his right arm around her shoulders and braced his left hand against his aching ribs, and they staggered off together toward the parking lot. She deposited him against the hood of his car, then carefully lifted his shirt.

  “Let me see that,” she said. “You may have some broken ribs.”

  The site was already turning a greenish shade of purple. She began to feel gingerly along the contour of each rib. He winced and pulled away.

  “Don’t be a baby,” she snapped. “You’re lucky you’re not dead. What in the world got into you back there? Why did you hit poor Beanie?”

  “Because ‘poor Beanie’ murdered Teddy.”

  Kathryn stared at him in utter astonishment.

  “The entry wound on the back of Teddy’s skull was a contact wound, remember? That means the gun was placed against his skin and then discharged. In a contact wound, the gases escape the muzzle at such tremendous velocity that they create a temporary vacuum in the barrel—and that vacuum sucks blood back into the barrel. It’s known as blowback. I watched a Calliphora vomitoria land on Beanie’s gun and crawl into the barrel. That fly is attracted to blood, Mrs. Guilford; fresh blood. It found some.”

  Kathryn shook her head in disbelief. “There must be some other explanation.”

  “Give me an explanation. Tell me any other way the deputy could have gotten blood into the barrel of his gun.”

  “Nick, this is Beanie we’re talking about. Beanie isn’t capable of killing anyone.”

  “He isn’t capable of hating anyone, Mrs. Guilford—I’m not even sure he’s capable of anger. You still want to believe that the deputy is a gigantic Pinocchio, and your friend the sheriff is just kindly old Gepetto. But this Pinocchio is capable of crushing a man’s hand or firing a bullet into a man’s brain or anything else Gepetto tells him to do.”

  Kathryn’s legs felt weak, and her head began to swim.

  “Didn’t you find it interesting that the sheriff suddenly developed a passion for Jenny McIntyre the other night? Didn’t you find it a little surprising? I’ll bet Jenny was surprised.”

  “That’s none of my business.”

  “It is your business, Mrs. Guilford. Don’t you see? When the sheriff told you he spent the night with Jenny McIntyre, he was telling the truth. He couldn’t have murdered Teddy and Mrs. Gallagher, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t send someone else to do the errands for him.”

  “Nick—do you know what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying that it wasn’t passion that led the sheriff to Jenny’s door. He needed an alibi. The sheriff was in some way involved in Jim McAllister’s death. When that last specimen emerged, it proved that the body was moved—and maybe it proved more than that. The sheriff had to intervene, but he knew that I would suspect him—so he sent his boy around to murder Teddy and to knock off Mrs. Gallagher just to throw us off the scent.

  “I know exactly what I’m saying, Mrs. Guilford, and so do you. I’m saying that if your friend the sheriff wasn’t a murderer before, he is now.”

  The crowd at Mount Zion A. M. E. had long ago dispersed. All that remained from the morning’s elaborate funeral reception were two folding tables draped unevenly in stained and wrinkled linens.

  Nick sat by himself on a sagging picnic bench. He picked at the splinters of decomposing wood; it was made of cedar, a wood whose natural resins were supposed to protect it from decay. Everything decomposes, Nick thought. Some get a little more time than others, but sooner or later everything breaks down.

  He lifted his shirt and gently tested his aching ribs. He was lucky; they were bruised, but not broken. A scarlet hematoma the size of his fist throbbed an angry reminder of how the world works: Blood vessels rupture under the skin. The blood pours into the surrounding tissues, and the stranded blood cells begin to die. The skin turns purple or blue or black. Black, the color of death; your own little piece of death to carry around with you.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the closing of a car door. He looked up to see Kathryn remove a small casserole dish from the backseat and turn in his direction. Her gait was slow and halting; it was obvious that she was very much preoccupied with thoughts of her own.

  “I have no idea why I brought this,” she said absently, setting the casserole down to secure the edge of a fluttering tablecloth.

  “Because there’s nothing else to do,” Nick said. “People have been bringing food to funerals for centuries.” He lifted the foil from the edge of the dish. “Tuna puffs … I love these things.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning—about Beanie and Teddy. About Peter.”

  “And?”

  “Nick, you’ve got to try to see all this from my perspective. We’re talking about Beanie—a little boy in a man’s body. And Peter, a man I’ve known and trusted all my life. You come to me with eggs and maggots and flies that can smell blood from miles away, and you ask me to weigh those things against the things I know.”

  Nick leaned his head back and drew a long, deep breath through his nose. “Smell the air,” he said to Kathryn. “Go ahead, give it a try. What do you smell?”

  She sniffed at the air. “Not much. Tuna, mostly.”

  “Come on, you can do better than that.”

  She sniffed again. “I can smell the pines. And the asphalt heating up in the driveway. And … I don’t know … some flowers, maybe.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Nick said. “Here we are, supposedly the highest form of life on the planet, and yet the only odors we can detect are so powerful that they would overwhelm a lower life form. We’re thinking beings,” he said, “but our senses have grown dull.”

  “Where are you going with all this?”

  “I find that sometimes a situation becomes clearer when you do more than think—when you use all of your senses. You say that the evidence I’ve shown you seems unconvincing compared with what you know about the sheriff—but what do your other senses tell you? How does he smell? How does the whole situation feel? What do your instincts tell you?”

  “You’re asking me to weigh what I smell against things I know?”

  “There are different ways of knowing,” Nick said. “Sometimes what we call ‘knowing’ is just a form of prejudice.”

  “So now I’m prejudiced?”

  “Of course you are. Look at it from my perspective, Mrs. Guilford. I see three men who all fell in love with you—and in your own way, you loved all three of them. You lost the one you loved the most; a week ago, you lost the second. Now you have only one left.”

  “And if I accept what you’re telling me, then I’ve lost Peter too. I’ve lost everything.”

  “You said you had to know, Mrs. Guilford. The truth doesn’t care.”

  “Well, I care,” Kathryn said, “and I still have to know. Before I give up on Peter, I have to be absolut
ely sure. I’m not like you, Nick. I can’t just smell things.”

  “Can’t you? While we were interviewing Amy McAllister, her house just happened to burn to the ground. Then Teddy committed an unthinkable blunder, and that same night was murdered in a random act of violence. A day later, I watched a fly in search of blood enter the barrel of the deputy’s gun. Come on, Mrs. Guilford—if you can smell asphalt, you can smell this.”

  “Can you tell me for certain—absolutely for certain—that there’s no other reason that fly might have crawled into Beanie’s gun? Did you ever stop to think that if you hadn’t hit Beanie, we might have found a way to get hold of his gun? We might have been able to have it tested to see if there really was any blood—and if it was Teddy’s?”

  Nick said nothing.

  “And there’s something else, Nick—if Peter spent the night with Jenny, how did Beanie get to Teddy’s trailer? He can’t drive, Nick—Beanie can’t drive. I’m sorry,” she said, “I need proof.”

  “Wish I could help you,” Nick shrugged. “But the only proof we might have had is gone—flying around somewhere, looking for a body of its own.”

  A small white door at the back door of the church opened, and the figure of Dr. Malcolm Jameson emerged, carrying a familiar black book at his side. Nick turned to Kathryn as he approached.

  “About all this,” Nick said with a wave of his hand.

  “You’re welcome. I just wish more people could be here.”

  “I wish Teddy could be here.”

  Dr. Jameson greeted them both with a solemn nod. “This seems an inappropriate location,” he said with a frown at the littered surroundings. “Perhaps Dr. Polchak could suggest something more apropos.”

  Nick quickly scanned the terrain; at the edge of the church property, through a break in the tree line a golden green meadow rose up and away from them, brilliant in the full noon sun.

  “There,” Nick said. “Teddy would like that spot.”

  The three of them walked toward the meadow together. Dr. Jameson’s pace was slow and deliberate, and Nick had to rein himself in to stay in step.