07-Peaches And Screams

by G. A. McKevett

  “Oh, he wore underwear,” old Zachariah piped up. He had been standing, silent and forgotten behind them, leaning against the wall. “Yessiree, bob! Alvin was famous for his knickers!”

  “That’s true! He was!” Herb said. “Everybody knew that he wore under wear!”

  Savannah was almost afraid to ask, but... “How?”

  Zachariah cackled and smiled a big, snaggly, gummy grin. “He was always wearing those thin white shorts, and everything showed right through ’em. Yeah, Alvin was famous for his leopard prints, and those red and purple paisley ones, and at Christmas . . .” He practically collapsed on the floor from laughing, and Savannah started to worry that maybe it was a hysterical reaction from finding the body earlier. “And at Christmas time,” Zachariah said between gasps, “he wore some that said, ‘Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe.’ And guess where the mistletoe was?”

  “I can just imagine,” Savannah said dryly, slapping Zach on the back to help him catch his breath.

  Once Zachariah had recovered, she turned to Dirk. “Hand me that shirt,” she said, taking the white polo shirt from him.

  She turned it inside out, then sniffed the sleeves.

  “Alvin never wore this shirt,” she said.

  “How do you know?” Tom snatched it out of her hand and looked it over.

  “The same way I know if I can get another wearing out of a sweater back home. Smell the pits. Nothing but laundry soap and bleach.”

  She took the shaving kit from Tammy, unzipped it, and removed the deodorant stick. “When I met him before, I thought he was wearing some god-awful, strong-smelling cologne. But it’s this deodorant. Man, you could deodorize a week-old dead horse with that stuff. If Alvin had worn that shirt, even for a minute or two, the pits would smell.”

  “Maybe he forgot to deodorize after showering,” Tom said.

  “A tennis instructor, no deodorant in this heat and humidity? Then it would smell like sweat. Not fabric softener.”

  They all stood quietly for a moment, mentally digesting.

  “Did you check the edge of the diving board for traces of blood or hair?” Dirk asked Tom.

  Reluctantly, Tom nodded. “Yeah, I walked out there earlier and looked.”

  “Nothing, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Dirk said. “Late last night, somebody hit our buddy Alvin over the back of the head and killed him . . . or at least knocked him out. There was probably blood all over the clothes he was wearing. So they put some swim trunks on him, dumped him in the pool outside, and planted these clothes here to look like he’d been diving and smacked his head.”

  “They knew something about his routine,” Savannah said, “like his locker combination . . .”

  “That’s nothing,” Zachariah said. “The combinations are on a list in the top drawer of the office desk, or somebody could’ve looked over his shoulder when he was unlocking it himself.”

  “. . . And they knew he put his wallet and keys in his shoes,” Savannah continued, “but not that he put his watch in there, too.”

  “And they didn’t know about his folding routine,” Dirk added.

  Tammy grinned broadly. “And apparently they hadn’t been around when Alvin bent over or they would have known that he had a fetish for crazy underwear.”

  “Naw,” Savannah said, “they just forgot the knickers. It’s hard to remember everything in the heat of the moment . . . you know, like right after you’ve killed another human being by smashing their skull in. Yep, at a time like that, no matter how smart you think you are, you’re just bound to forget something.”

  Chapter 19

  Savannah jiggled the lock pick slightly and heard that soft telltale click that told her she had done it again—successfully executed a felony “break and enter.”

  Standing at Alvin Barnes’s back door, she and Dirk cast another cautious look around to see if anyone might be watching. But the neighborhood seemed remarkably quiet for a Saturday afternoon.

  “You’re a bad influence on me, Van,” he said. “Usually I limit myself to bending the law slightly out of shape, but I generally stop short of actually breaking it.”

  “It’s Tom’s fault,” she said. “I asked him politely for the keys. By refusing, he put me in a difficult spot. If he catches us and locks us up, he’ll have nobody but himself to blame.”

  He shook his head and chuckled. “I can’t believe I actually understood that. I’ve been hanging out with you way too long.”

  Quickly, silently, they slipped inside the house.

  “Good grief,” she said, looking around at the white, sparkling surfaces of the kitchen, “this is the cleanest place I’ve ever been.”

  “Sure doesn’t look like my bachelor pad.”

  Scenes of Dirk’s trailer flashed across her mind, visions of rusty TV trays, stacked orange crates, an old school-bus seat—and that was just the furniture. But she decided to be kind and let the moment pass without comment.

  “Yep, Alvin was a neatnik, all right,” she said, pointing out the spotless glass table with its basket of fake fruit neatly arranged in the center.

  Dirk opened the refrigerator and a couple of cupboards. “I swear, I think he alphabetizes his cereals.”

  “No way.”

  He pointed to the shelf where, indeed, Alpha-Bits were to the far left, followed by Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, and Wheaties.

  “Oh, boy . . . I don’t ever want to be that organized.”

  “Don’t worry; you won’t be.”

  The living room proved just as orderly, with magazines stacked neatly on the chrome-and-glass coffee table. Three remote controls lay side by side next to a stack of cork coasters.

  “See,” Savannah said. “There are men in the world who use coasters!”

  “Not real men. He probably ate quiche and needle-pointed in his spare time.”

  “Judging from the six-pack he was sporting on his belly, I’d say he spent a lot of time in here,” Savannah said, pointing to a mini-gym set up in a small bedroom off the living room area. A stationary bike, a chin-up bar, an abs machine, and assorted free weights were arranged in meticulous, military order around the room. The walls were mirrored.

  No surprise there, Savannah thought. Why torture yourself with exotic devices and not give yourself ample opportunities to admire the results?

  Farther down a short hall she found the bedroom. Although this room was as neat and spotless as the rest of the house, the leopard bedspread and tiger-striped rug revealed a less civilized aspect of Alvin Barnes’s personality. Over the bed hung a gilt-framed print of a pair of black panthers in a jungle setting.

  “Overdone,” Dirk said, sticking his head into the room. “Overt. A decorator’s feeble attempt at primitive expression.”

  “Eh, you’re just jealous. You’d love to entertain a member of the feminine gender in a room like this.”

  “Hell, I’d be happy to entertain a feminine anybody anywhere these days.”

  “Speaking of the feminine persuasion,” Savannah said after opening several drawers before coming to one containing women’s clothes. “A lady is . . . or was . . . living here, too.”

  “Bonnie?”

  “Probably, although if it’s her, I withdraw the ‘lady’ part.”

  Dirk slid open the closet door. “Don’t think much of her, huh?”

  “Not much at all.”

  In the adjoining bathroom, Savannah found sanitary napkins under the sink and hairspray in the medicine chest. A hot pink toothbrush with glitter in the handle rested in the holder, next to a navy-blue one.

  “Alvin left abruptly,” she said. “But Bonnie packed.”

  “Are you sure?” Dirk asked, joining her in the bathroom.

  “Oh, yes. I’m sure.”

  “But that’s gotta be her toothbrush. I mean, even a guy who’s Mr. Susie Homemaker wouldn’t stick a thing like that in his mouth.”

  “So she left the toothbrush. She probably had another.
There’s no makeup case. No woman with spider lashes and frosted blue lids is going to go anywhere without her ‘Face in a Bag.’ And there are no hair-grooming implements except that one dryer, and that’s a guy’s. No curling wand, steaming rollers, nothing to create that ‘big hair look’ that Bonnie had going. She packed.”

  Dirk nodded. “Okay, maybe she killed Alvin . . . and the judge, too, for that matter.”

  “Maybe the judge, but I don’t know about Alvin. He was a lot bigger than her. That wound on the back of his head was straight across. No angle. She was so much shorter than him, that if she swung something at him, the line of the wound would probably angle upward.”

  “That’s assuming they were both standing. What if he was bent over when she whacked him?”

  Savannah said nothing for several seconds, then wrinkled her nose as though smelling something odious. “I hate it when you pop my bubbles.”

  “Like you’re not always stickin’ your fingers in mine. Besides, I agree. I don’t think a short, scrawny chick like Bonnie caused that nasty gash. It’s possible, but I’d put my money on a guy with some beef.”

  Savannah gave the bathroom and bedroom another look. “Whoever did it, they didn’t do it in here. Nothing bloody happened in these rooms. Let’s search the yard.”

  In the backyard, they checked again for potentially nosy neighbors and saw no one.

  “I wish my trailer park was as quiet as Alvin’s neighborhood,” Dirk said as he strolled along a sidewalk that led from the back door of the house toward a garage and then the alley at the rear of the property. “There’s always kids runnin’ around, yelling their heads off, throwing Frisbees—”

  “Drunks throwing beer bottles. . . .” Savannah added.

  “Oh, shut up. That’s usually only on Saturday nights when the old fart next to me and his battle-ax wife mix it up.”

  Savannah followed him, looking at everything, searching for anything that warranted her attention. Long ago, she had learned that when conducting an investigation, you seldom know what you’re looking for . . . until you find it.

  The yard was small and simple: a patch of dandelion-free grass; a couple of flower beds containing close-clipped bushes; a cement driveway that, unlike hers at home, had not one spot of oil on its surface; a garden hose coiled in perfect loops on a hook on the rear wall of the house.

  As she worked her way toward the back of the lot, she noted a garbage-burning barrel where the sidewalk ended at the alley. Dirk was leaning over it, examining its contents.

  “Anything good?”

  “Naw, just ashes and crap.”

  Oh, well, she thought. Too much to hope for a slightly singed, bloody shirt or only half-burned murder weapon. And, while you’re dreaming, a full set of perfect fingerprints on said weapon.

  As she walked along the side of the garage, past a large rhododendron, she paused and did a double take. The garage wall, like the rear of the house, had a garden hose on a hook.

  “Hey,” she said, “check this out.”

  He hurried over. “Yeah, so what? It’s a hose. Probably for when the fire in the barrel gets outta hand.”

  “It’s messy.”

  “What do you mean, messy? It’s wrapped up nice on a hook.”

  “Nice by your standards, and even by mine. But not Alvin Barnes’s standards. Look at the one on the house. The coils are all even, lined up next to each other. This one’s just sorta wound around, like the rest of the world would do it.”

  She looked down at the ground, the freshly raked soil around the base of the rhododendron. It was damp.

  Kneeling on the sidewalk, she felt the dirt and grass on either side. They, too, were wet.

  “Somebody hosed this area down,” she said, “recently.”

  “Maybe Alvin was watering his flowers.”

  She checked the ground around the bush directly across the sidewalk on the other side. “The grass is wet beside the sidewalk, but the dirt under the plant is dry. Why would he water one, but not the other?”

  She stood, turned back toward the house, and let her imagination go to work. “You know,” she said, “this would be a good place to pop somebody. At night, it would be pretty dark back here. If he were bringing the garbage out—Alvin would be meticulous about that—you could hide right here behind the rhododendron bush and when he got about here . . .”

  Dirk swung like he was knocking one into the bleachers. “Whack!”

  “Yep.”

  She walked up to the wall and placed her cheek against it, looking down the length of the white stucco surface. “Somebody rinsed off the wall in this section right here,” she said. “There’s dust . . . not a lot, but some . . . all along the wall, except for an area right there, where the ground’s wet.”

  “Blood splatter,” Dirk said. “He was washing off the evidence.”

  “Maybe. If that’s where the killer struck him, that’s about where the blood would land.”

  “And on the sidewalk.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And he’d wash it down really good, to make sure he’d got it all, and it would probably still be wet.”

  “Just like this. . . .”

  “Yeah. Just like this.”

  Savannah looked back at the house, the driveway, the sidewalk and the alley. “Okay, let’s run this down,” she said. “I want to knock off Alvin Barnes. Maybe I know that he takes his garbage out every night at a certain time, maybe I don’t. But either way, I wait out here behind the bush. He comes out and I let him have it on the back of the head. He goes down.”

  Dirk nodded thoughtfully. “Then you probably wrap up the body in something you brought along to protect your trunk, dump him in your car—”

  “Which would probably be here in the alley, so that he wouldn’t have seen it earlier.”

  “Then you go into the house . . . the door would be unlocked . . . and you get a clean set of clothes out of his closet.”

  “But you forget the underwear.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, murder’s stressful. Especially the premeditated, cold-blooded kind.”

  “Where do you suppose he took off the bloody clothes and changed him into the swimsuit?”

  “If it were me . . . I’d do it here, after he’s in the trunk. More private than the club. I’d strip him off there in the car and wrap the bloody clothes around his head, soaking up the rest. I’d put the trunks, or whatever you call those pansy things, on him then.”

  Savannah turned toward the alley. “And I’d put the clean clothes in the car and take off.”

  “And after you got there?”

  “Pull the car onto that strip of road right by the pool, make sure nobody was around, take him out of the trunk, and throw him in the water. Then I’d plant the clean clothes, the wallet, and the keys in his locker.”

  “Forgetting the watch.”

  “Right. Then I’d dispose of the clothes, the weapon, and whatever I’d wrapped the body in.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, please . . .” she said. “Who do you think I am? Madame Sophia with her crystal ball?”

  “Without those things, we don’t have a case.”

  She shrugged. “We don’t need to prove a case right now. We just need a working theory about what happened.”

  “And you think that’s what happened?”

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  “Close enough . . . for a working theory, as you call it.”

  They looked around the yard once more, and finding nothing more, they left.

  As they drove away, Savannah said, “You wanna know the scary part of all this?”

  “He’s smart.”

  “That’s right. And cold. And methodical.”

  They rounded a corner and hit the highway.

  “Bonnie Patterson?” Dirk asked.

  “Cold enough? Probably. But not tall enough. And definitely, definitely not smart enough. If I had to guess, I’d say that Bonnie Patterson knows who killed the judge, who ki
lled Alvin, and she’s running for her life.”

  Chapter 20

  Dirk dropped Savannah off at Gran’s house and left with the intention of tracking down Tom Stafford and sharing information with him. Savannah had warned him that Tom might not be as imaginative in his interpretation of the untidy hose and the wet sidewalk. But he said it would also give him the opportunity to find out if Tom had anything new.

  Savannah figured she had to at least stick her head in the house and make an appearance, just in case a wedding really was on the family agenda.

  Visions of violent peach dresses danced through her head as she hurried through the screen door and into a living room full of hysterical, crying women.

  After a closer look and a more accurate assessment, she decided that, although the room was brimming with Reid sisters, only one was actually sobbing hysterically.

  “Mari! What’s wrong?” She rushed to take her distraught sister in her arms and got pushed away for her troubles.

  “What do you think is wrong?” Marietta’s eyes were puffy red slits in a swollen white face. Her usually perfect hairdo hung to one side of her head, a lopsided French twist. “It’s off! He went back to . . . back to . . . Lucille!”

  She collapsed onto the sofa, where Alma enveloped her in a tight hug and rocked her as though she was a six-year-old whose puppy had just died.

  Cordele sat next to her and primly patted her hand. “You know, it’s probably just as well, Mari. Lester had unresolved issues with his ex-wife that would have contaminated any—”

  “Oh, shut up, Cordele!” Marietta said, throwing her hand off. “You just shut your fat mouth before I slap you stupid! None of you’ve got a lick o’ sense. None of you have any idea the pain I’m going through here. The soulish agony.”

  From the vicinity of the recliner, Waycross’s voice rose in a plaintive, wailing rendition of an old spiritual. “Nobody knows de trouble I see. . . .”

  “You go to hell, Waycross!” Marietta screamed. “Go straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars! You hear me, boy!”