A Parfait Murder

by Wendy Lyn Watson

  “Do you understand these—”

  “Mama, Gram just wrote a dirty word—”

  Alice tumbled into the back room just as Cal was finishing reading Bree her rights and as he was taking her gently by the arm to lead her away.

  “What’s going on?” Alice demanded.

  “It’s okay, honey. Aunt Tally will explain everything.”

  Dear heavens, I’d rather explain anything in the world to the girl—sex, quantum physics, politics—than why Cal was taking her mother to jail.

  “Mom!” The note of panic in Alice’s voice made her sound even younger than her seventeen years. Made her sound like a child. A child who needed her mommy.

  “Hush, Alice,” Bree soothed, even as Cal held open the back door for her. “I’ll be home soon.”

  As the door whooshed shut behind her, I rushed to Alice and wrapped my arms around her to support her.

  “It’s okay, Alice,” I said, praying I was telling the truth. “It’s just a mistake. We’ll get it straightened out soon.”

  Cal must have pulled some serious strings, but he managed to get Bree booked and arraigned within a few hours. Bail was set at a staggering figure we couldn’t possibly afford to cover, but Finn—whose mother had transferred the deed to her house to him before moving into the nursing home—put up his suburban house as collateral on her bond.

  “We’re family,” he explained simply. “That’s what we do.”

  As a result, Bree was back in the bosom of her family by dinnertime.

  For the first time since we’d opened, I actually shut down the A-la-mode without notice. Just posted a sheet of paper on the door that read COME VISIT US AT THE FAIR, where Beth and Kyle were holding down the fort.

  The family, Finn included, gathered at the house, a pan of hastily prepared spinach lasagna, garlic bread, beer, and a plate of Peachy’s butterscotch bars providing sustenance.

  “What I don’t understand,” Bree said around a mouthful of garlic bread, “is why Kristen’s call isn’t showing up on the phone company’s records. I swear she called me.”

  “Did you get any other calls that night?” Finn asked.

  “That’s just it. Cal said that I did get a call—from Alice. But Alice didn’t call. Did you, baby?”

  Alice stopped chewing midbite. She grabbed for her glass of water and washed down the lasagna that had apparently gotten stuck in her craw.

  “Oh, Mama,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What for?” Bree looked as lost as I felt.

  “I lost my phone.”

  “So? It’s just a cheapie. We’ll get you a new one.”

  “No, I mean I lost my phone that night. The night Dad—Sonny came back to town.”

  “Help me out here,” Bree said, a note of impatience creeping into her voice.

  Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place, and I jumped in. “After the big confrontation between you and Sonny at the fairgrounds, after you told Alice her daddy was back in town, Alice borrowed Kyle’s Bonnie and took a little spin. Right?”

  Alice nodded, miserable. “Yeah.” She reached a hand out toward her mother, letting it rest on the dining table between them. “I know I told you I didn’t care he was back, that I didn’t want to see him, but I did. I didn’t want to talk to him, exactly, just see him. You know?”

  Bree closed the gap and settled her hand on top of Alice’s. “I know, baby.”

  Poor Alice cleared her throat. “I drove around looking for him. I heard he was driving a nice car, a shiny red Lexus. I finally spotted it at nearly ten that night, parked at the Dutch Oven.”

  “Sonny always loved their pancakes,” Bree muttered.

  The Dutch Oven had once been a national chain pancake house, but the franchisee had gotten tired of paying money to some big corporation. He’d changed the name, painted the restaurant’s A-frame roof from blue to red, and planted a windmill he’d bought from a defunct mini-golf outlet in the parking lot. I don’t know how much he changed the chain’s recipe, but he’d managed to avoid a lawsuit.

  “I parked the Bonnie right next to the Lexus, figuring I’d wait for him. But it was hot, so I got out and sat on the hood. I saw him inside, sitting with these two ladies—one blond, one redheaded. I pulled out my phone because I’d scanned that picture of him from my baby book—the one where he’s holding me and smiling?—and I had it saved on the phone. I recognized him from that picture.”

  Lord. No little girl should have to recognize her daddy that way, by seeing the resemblance between him and a grainy Polaroid picture.

  “I was sitting there waiting, trying to figure out what I’d say, when the blond lady came out. She asked me who I was.” Alice looked down in her lap, ashamed. “I said some ugly things. I don’t even remember what. But I told her that the man she was having coffee with had abandoned his wife and child. That he was a horrible human being and she must be horrible, too, if she was hanging around with him.

  “I slid off the hood of the Bonnie. I’m not sure whether I was going to leave, or whether I was going to storm into the Dutch Oven and pick a fight with him. But the blond lady grabbed me by the arm.”

  Alice swallowed hard. She kept calling the woman “the blond lady,” but we all knew it was Kristen Ver Steeg she’d met in the parking lot. I wondered briefly whether depersonalizing her helped Alice cope a little.

  “The lady told me that I was right. Sonny wasn’t a good guy. But she knew about bad guys, and she’d take care of it. I pulled away from her, climbed in the Bonnie, and took off.

  “I pulled into the Mickey-D’s parking lot just down the highway, planning to call Kyle, but my phone was gone. I must have dropped it in the parking lot.”

  Bree nodded. “And Kristen picked it up. That’s how she got the number for the landline in my bedroom. And that’s why the phone records only show one call that night, from your phone.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama! I should have told you I saw her that night. I should have told you I lost my phone. But I didn’t know you’d get arrested because I screwed up.”

  Bree slid off her chair and knelt at Alice’s side, pulling her daughter into a brutal hug. “Honey, you didn’t screw up. And you didn’t get me arrested. Cal made it clear the prosecutor got the indictment based on the physical evidence at the fair. They didn’t even have the phone records when they went to the grand jury.”

  Finn, Peachy, and I had been silent observers during Alice’s bleak confession, but Peachy finally chimed in.

  “That Sonny Anders is up to no damn good. I wish I knew what dirty piece of business brought him slithering back to Dalliance and into our lives.”

  Finn piped up. “Funny you should mention it. Mike Carberry told me that Sonny had invited a select group of Dalliance businessmen to the Parlay Inn tonight. Said he wanted to present them with a proposition.”

  “A deal with the devil?” Peachy asked.

  Finn grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “What do you say, kiddo? Want to go see what Sonny Anders has to offer the good people of Dalliance?”

  Yes. Yes, I did.

  chapter 12

  The Parlay Inn buzzed with excitement. Whatever happened as the evening unfolded, it was sure to be the stuff of Dalliance legend. Sonny had thrown around enough cash and dropped enough hints that folks were mighty interested in hearing what he had to say. But those same folks also remembered him from his rockabilly, grease-monkey, petty criminal days. Those memories did not inspire confidence. Whichever way the dice fell, though, Sonny Anders was sure to spin a good story. There were a lot of white heads tipped back in expectation, a lot of beefy arms folded across barrel chests.

  I didn’t bar-hop much, and when I did go out for a cocktail, I tended to patronize the Bar None—with its plank floors, neon beer signs, and Wednesday karaoke. The Parlay Inn catered to a different clientele, mostly male, mostly over fifty, and mostly pretty set in their ways. Black-and-white photos of Dalliance’s development, a polished brass bar rail, a
nd an amber-tinted Wurlitzer reinforced the air of tradition.

  Finn and I snagged a tiny table near the jukebox. I wanted to be out of the way, but we both wanted to hear all the details. We figured no one would be dropping quarters in the juke during Sonny’s spiel.

  He took the floor at five past the hour, his hands raised like those of a revival preacher blessing his flock.

  “Friends,” he shouted, “friends.” The chatter in the bar died down, and Sonny lowered his voice a bit. But he still projected like a seasoned orator.

  “Thank you all for coming out tonight. It’s good to see some familiar faces here, folks I haven’t seen in a good long while.” His lips slid across his teeth in a Cheshire grin. “We’re all a little less fired up than we used to be, but we’re not quite out of gas yet. Am I right?”

  A wave of backslapping and manly chuckles rippled through the room.

  “Friends,” he said again, “y’all know I’m just a good ol’ boy with more spit than sense. But I’ve been blessed in my life to find a woman with a good head on her shoulders. This here’s Charlize Guidry.”

  Char moved to stand by Sonny’s side. She was dressed in a delicate dove gray suit. Teal silk peeped from the deep neck of the jacket, and the ladylike peplum hinted at delicious curves beneath the staid wool. The skirt was carefully fitted, but not too tight. No one could question the professionalism of her attire, but she somehow oozed sex nonetheless.

  “Char’s daddy, Remy Guidry—well, y’all may have heard tell of Remy.” Sonny’s chin dropped and he fixed his crowd with a knowing stare. Sure enough, a murmur of assent rose from the group, and I saw a number of heads nodding gently.

  I shot Finn a look. He leaned in. “Oldest con in the book. Make people feel like they’re stupid if they don’t know what you’re talking about, and then they’re too scared of looking foolish to question you.”

  “Char, here, learned a thing or two at her daddy’s knee. I’ll let her explain.”

  Char stepped forward and raised her head. I don’t know how she managed it, but at that precise moment, a single lock of cinnamon candy hair slipped from the tidy French twist and caressed her jaw.

  No one made a peep.

  “Gentlemen, there is a fortune beneath your feet. A fortune in petroleum, the food of this nation’s economy. It’s right there, so close you can practically taste it.” The tip of her tongue darted out to lick the corner of her lip, and the whole room gasped softly. She owned them.

  “The trick, as you all know, is to get that oil out of the ground. I’m sure you’ve all heard horror stories about fracking.”

  There wasn’t a soul in Texas who wasn’t familiar with fracking: hydraulic fracturing. Drillers pumped fluid into petroleum-rich rock at a high rate of pressure. The fluid fractured the rock, releasing the petroleum, and increasing the production of the well.

  The problem was the chemicals in the fracturing fluid could contaminate the water table, could seep back to the surface and contaminate the soil and air. Not to mention concerns that breaking up rock could cause geologic events like earthquakes.

  Texans aren’t usually on the side of the tree huggers, but the folks in Dalliance and in lots of similar communities were leery enough of fracking that they resisted offers from oil companies to milk the shale for oil and gas. . . and money. It was one thing to muck around beneath foreign soil or the unpopulated desert to the west, but another thing entirely to pulverize the very ground beneath our feet.

  Char raised a pale hand to forestall any grumbling. “I’ve got an alternative. One hundred percent safe.”

  A few murmurs of disbelief began welling up from the crowd, but Char tossed her head, sending that lock of hair bouncing, and—like magic—the room grew silent again.

  “I can’t say too much, because we’ve got six patents pending on this process, but instead of pushing the oil from the rock, it pulls the oil from the rock. We use the petroleum’s own molecular structure to our advantage. The rock itself remains perfectly intact. And we replace the petroleum with a compound with the exact same molecular weight and viscosity, so the rock remains stable.”

  Dave Epler, chairman of Dalliance’s Chamber of Commerce and owner of half the new and used auto dealerships in town, rose to his feet, his joints creaking and grinding audibly beneath the weight of sixty years of whiskey and chicken-fried everything. He cleared his throat with a liquid “horp.”

  “What about that compound? What’s in it?”

  Char smiled and batted her lashes. “Now, sir, I sure wish I could tell you that.” Her voice oozed like warm butter through the room. “But this is some pretty valuable intellectual property. What I can tell you is that I’ve tasted the stuff myself.”

  “Tasted?”

  “Yessir. Tasted. Just a little lick, mind you. I wouldn’t brush it on a brisket, but it didn’t make me sick.”

  The whole crowd rustled and muttered, the swell of noise reaching a crescendo before subsiding in the face of Sonny’s raised hands.

  “I told you, folks, she’s a smart cookie,” he quipped.

  Dave shifted from one trunklike leg to the other and raised a hand of his own. “Let’s cut the bull crap,” he barked, chopping the air to punctuate his command. “What’s on the table? Why are you here?”

  Sonny cupped his hand around Char’s elbow and guided her back to her seat, the noble gentleman and his lady. “All righty,” he said when she had settled in, “let’s get down to brass tacks.

  “I met Ms. Guidry up in Pennsylvania where she was making a tidy fortune for a small private gas production firm. I was providing some related services for those gentlemen, and I realized what a gem they had on their hands. But they were small-minded men with no real vision. They knew the natural gas fields of the Midwest, but were too timid to tackle the real honeypot down here in the Altemont Shale.”

  Sonny propped a foot on the seat of a chair, and braced his hand on his knee. “Char and I have bigger plans, and that’s why we’re here.”

  Dave grumbled. “So you want us to sign over our leases? Let you drill on our land?”

  Sonny wagged his head back and forth. “No, sir. Me and Char, we want to bring the good people of Dalliance in as equal partners.”

  Now Mike Carberry stood, angling his way to Dave Epler’s side. “Why? If this is such a surefire thing, why make us partners?”

  Sonny brushed some imaginary lint from the knee of his pants. “Look,” he said, “I could feed you some line of bullshit about it being the right thing to do and wanting to give back to the community and all that nonsense. But y’all weren’t born yesterday.”

  That drew a few appreciative chuckles from the audience.

  “Truth is, Charlize and I have some contractual encumbrances. See, we worked with that outfit up in PA, and we had noncompete clauses in our contracts. I consulted with counsel both up north and here. Ms. Kristen Ver Steeg.”

  He paused while a few folks crossed themselves, ducked their heads, or swiped off their hats at the invocation of the dead.

  “The lawyers talked a lot of Latin to us, but at the end of the day it boiled down to something pretty simple. They explained that we cannot utilize Ms. Guidry’s technology for profit in our own names. But there’s a little loophole in that contract. See, as long as Charlize and I are not the majority shareholders of any competing enterprise, that clause doesn’t kick in. So we’ve set up a corporation, y’all buy shares in the corporation—invest capital in exchange for a share of the profits—then we license the technology to the corporation, which is totally legit, and God willing—we all get rich.”

  “What’s the catch?” Dave said, and the crowd behind him murmured its support. “You’re not talking to a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears venture capitalists. We’ve all been around the block a time or two, and we know there’s no such thing as a perfect deal.”

  Sonny nodded gravely. “You’re right, Dave. And I respect you too much to sugarcoat this. This here’s a time-sensitive d
eal. Those fellas up in Pennsylvania, they weren’t too eager to expand their business into Texas. Some sort of tax issue. But they have investors, too, who might want to go it alone. Or the Pennsylvania guys might decide the profit is worth the risk. We gotta strike now, while the iron’s hot.

  “And”—he held up his hands—“Char and I, we’ve put a lot of our sweat and heart into this deal. The tech’s all hers, and I put up the money for the lawyers for the patents and to do the land work down here. We don’t want to carve up this pie too much. So we’re only taking six partners, at ten percent each, for a total of sixty percent of the deal. The other forty percent, that’s me and Char. We’re limiting people to a single ten percent buy-in, and no married couples or blood relatives. We don’t want our partners ganging up and forcing us out of this deal.”

  “Numbers,” Dave barked.

  “Twenty grand gets you in.”

  Someone from the back of the room shouted out, “What happened to the ‘good people of Dalliance’?”

  Sonny’s lips twisted in a wry smile. “Like I said, friends, we’re not saints. We’re entrepreneurs. I’m happy some of my old buddies get to enjoy some profit here, but this is our project. Our bottom line.”

  Charlize stood and smoothed her hands over her skirt, her hair. Sonny started moving through the crowd, handing out business cards. Finn waved at Mike Carberry, indicating Mike should snag one of those cards for him. “We’re staying out at the Ramada,” Sonny announced, raising his voice to be heard over the hubbub of folks gathering their things. “Time is of the essence.”

  I laid a hand on Finn’s forearm. “No one’s gonna buy that load of crap, are they?”

  Finn shook his head. “You’d be surprised what people will fall for.”

  “But surely with the Internet and all, it wouldn’t take two seconds to poke holes in their story.”

  He shrugged. “I bet not. What did they really tell us? Her daddy’s Remy Guidry. South Louisiana is crawling with Guidrys, half of them named Remy . . . surely one or two of them made a little cash in the oil boom of the late seventies. And they’re using fracking all over the Midwest, but those companies don’t disclose the formulas for the fluids they use. It’s proprietary stuff. Very hush-hush. No way to prove or disprove that Charlize Guidry created a miracle technique for extracting gas from shale. At least, not in a few days.”