Death in Living Gray

by John Clayton

  Waving at Fanny as she went out the door, I sidled over to a barstool.

  Jezebel slipped around to the front of the bar and took a seat next to mine. “I didn’t want to intrude while your friends were here.” It sounded accusing, like she didn’t have any friends—well, Fanny and I came in often enough but we never said much to her besides ordering drinks.

  She popped a piece of bubble gum, sucking it back in her mouth. “Trying to quit smoking with gum—now trying to quit blowing bubbles.”

  I waited. If she dumped Jack Senior, he’d just find somebody else. At least for the time being I knew where I could find him. It was her lead.

  And she did, but not what I was expecting, “Back when Mr. Pickerill gave that last big do about a year ago, there was this strange lady came in asking about your house. Had a map out with a bunch of x’s marked on it. Asked the names of the people who owned them. Said she was trying to get oriented and that I could save her some time.”

  Jezebel was sitting close. I could feel her perfume mixed with sweat from moving the barrels. She blew a bubble with a big red smudge where her lipstick marked it, then went on, “Said she was an aluminum siding salesman looking for frame houses to cover. First woman home improvement door-to-door salesman I ever saw. But then there’s them that do almost everything now. ’Cept, of course, she was probably a grandmother—’bout your age.”

  There was no malice in her tone, so I didn’t take offense.

  “Said she was from Baltimore. She pronounced it Baw’more so it must be true. I heard you was interested in strange things that happened around here back then and this just seemed a little stranger than most.”

  I said it seemed so to me too, and asked if there was anything else unusual about the lady. “She also had a mark about the Bill o’ Rights Motel—but then she had so many marks that it’s hard to tell what was important,” Jezebel said as she shifted a little. “Oh, and she also had a mark around the Old Pickerill Place. That was odd, because it’s brick.”

  So we had a lady who was asking about our place and the Pickerills’ and was staying at the Bill o’ Rights Motel, a family oriented establishment over on the highway east of Mason City. It would be worth checking out if my efforts to suborn Weevil didn’t work out.

  I thanked her for the information, got down from the stool and left quickly. She’d been trying to be helpful, and I felt a little bad that Fanny and I always ignored her. If I didn’t think that she was sleeping with my husband, we might have been friends—or at least not mid-level enemies.

  ***

  The May afternoon was just warm enough, encompassed by a special light blue sky—the kind of day that encourages the personnel of the Sheriff’s Department to go over to the highway and relax by writing citations for out-of-state speeders. I was safe enough here because it’s pretty hard to speed on the road to the Ornery Springs. Although on parts of it you could get picked up for driving too fast for conditions at twenty miles an hour. At least it was paved—between the potholes.

  I pulled down the front driveway of the Tuttle farmhouse, gone further to seed since Daddy Tuttle died. I can’t ever remember seeing any paint on the two story rectangular shape, but now the doors and window shutters seemed to be a little more askew. Well, Tillie was over eighty and Tattie was almost as old. Tattie was out hoeing the vegetable garden, now reduced to about half an acre. It would have been easier to plow with the old tractor I bought from them, beat-up as it was, but Tattie claimed she couldn’t see where she was plowing any more from up in the seat. So they did it the hard way in their old age.

  Double X, a mongrel with a vague resemblance to a Labrador, came wobbling up to the car, sniffed at my boots as I got out, looked away as if thinking about whether he remembered the scent, and then decided not to bark. He didn’t see too well either, since in dog years he was about one hundred—older than the sisters. Daddy Tuttle had named him Double X in honor of his favorite pastime and part-time occupation, bootlegging—making it, not drinking it. The Tuttle patriarch had been a good Southern Baptist and never consumed the stuff himself. He just supplied others who weren’t so good. ’Course he couldn’t test it if he didn’t drink it, so he got himself a chemical test set for quality control after he almost poisoned old Richard Overhouse, the father of the current sheriff. Tillie came out onto the front porch with a tray of lemonade and some of her famous apple pie with raisins, mint, and a couple of ingredients she refused to divulge. Telling Double X to shut up even though he wasn’t barking, she hollered at Tattie to come help her entertain company.

  I took the offered seat in a big old pressed back rocker, a glass of cold lemonade, and Double X’s head in my lap. I began with the weather, which everybody allowed was good, except maybe a mite dry to get the pole beans off to a good start. And then progressed to compliment the ladies on how good they looked—which, of course, opened the litany of ailments. Tattie with cataracts and Tillie with rheumatism.

  Tattie conceded, “Old age mostly. When we were young we could’a passed for twins except that Tillie’s ten years older then me.”

  “Ha, ten months to the day, and I wouldn’t want you for a twin,” Tillie replied. It was their standard conversation after the weather.

  I looked it up once just for curiosity, and found that Tattie was in fact only three years younger and they were certainly not twins, at least not identical. Tattie was large, big-boned, and red-faced, with steel gray hair blossoming above a checked shirt and bib overalls. She took after her father. Tillie was small and sparrow-like, jumping around like a white-haired bird in a frilly apron. She took after Mummy Tuttle, or so the local gossips said. They also said that Mummy Tuttle died young rather than spend a life putting up with Daddy Tuttle’s parsimony. As might be guessed, Tattie did the farming, while Tillie did the housework.

  “You still interested in the combine?” Tattie asked, coming to the point.

  “We could come down a little on the price, maybe.” Tillie said tentatively.

  “After all, it’s just sitting there out behind the barn.” Tattie explained.

  “Rusting,” Tillie added.

  “And we’d feel it was put to some good use.”

  “If you was to buy it.”

  “’Sides, we got to get rid of everything before one of us dies,” Tattie explained.

  “And the other has to go down the road to the Baptist home,” Tillie finished.

  They both stopped talking at the same time and waited.

  So I answered that I really didn’t need the combine right now, but said I might before September. I let it trail off. Who knew what would happen by then.

  “What I really need,” I told the sisters, “is a little information. Do you know about the body in the secret compartment in the fireplace over at the manor?”

  As both ladies shook their heads, I had to explain for about the tenth time in two days.

  “And you’re afraid the sheriff won’t do a good job.” It was Tattie again who came right to the point.

  But Tillie had to explain. “Daddy had to get our brother Bulldog—you know, Weevil’s father—to get that information from Richard Overhouse behind his back so he could outsmart them out-of-state revenooers that came to bother the people hereabouts.”

  “The Overhouses always been a little weak in the brains department,” Tattie added. “Good people, though. Go to Independent Baptist Church regularly, even if they don’t recognize real Baptists. Thought they was too good to be regular. I suppose.”

  Just like the Overhouse dynasty, the bootlegging Tuttles had by some unwritten rule always had an inside man—a brother or a cousin—in the Sheriff’s Department. Bulldog Tuttle had preceded his son Weevil as deputy.

  “I was wondering if you’d put in a good word with Weevil for me and get him to let me know what the sheriff finds out about the burglary,” I suggested.

  “He’s got a mind of his own, you know,” Tillie warned.

  “Likes to do things his own way. Specially
since Daddy died,” Tattie added.

  “He might refuse just to prove that he’s independent,” Tillie said.

  Just like most of the locals, I thought. Mason County was named for George Mason, who refused to sign the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was added. The residents here didn’t think much about those rights except for the one about having a full gun rack in the back window of their pickup trucks—but they did take the refusing part to heart. Weevil was just about average, which meant you had to be a relative to get him to do anything—at least in your own lifetime.

  “But we’ll give him a call and get him to listen to you,” Tattie volunteered. “After all, you took that no-count tractor off our hands.”

  “And haven’t you been living here for over thirty years? That makes you almost a relative.” Tillie explained, as she got up, took my glass, and headed back toward the inside of the house for a refill to seal the deal.

  As she went through the screen door, I saw that the old white cabinet that used to lean up against the wall in the hallway was gone. I’d asked to buy it once the Tuttles were closer to heaven and the Baptist home respectively. It was solid oak with a white milk paint finish, worth maybe a thousand dollars to a commuter. I asked if they’d moved it or perhaps used it for kindling.

  Tattie didn’t laugh at my joke but tried to talk about getting the tomatoes in and how good the strawberries were this year.

  “Oh, we sold that,” Tillie said as she came out to the porch with another round of lemonade. “I know we said we’d save it for you.”

  Tattie had worked up her courage by now. “But this nice young man came by and asked for a drink of water because his thermos had sprung a leak.”

  And the rest of the story came out so fast I couldn’t tell who said what.

  “When he was inside, he said that the cupboard was just like one that his grandmother used to have down in Southside Virginia.”

  “Danville, I think he said.”

  “And that she had given it to him, but didn’t put it in the will, so it had to be sold at auction because all the rest of the family was only interested in the money.”

  “And when it came up to auction it went for one hundred dollars, which he couldn’t afford since he was just starting out working his own farm.”

  “And he asked if we would sell it for fifty dollars, which was all he had except for money for gas to get back home.”

  “Said he’d even skip lunch if we’d sell it to him.”

  “So we sold it to him and helped him tie it on the back of his old pickup truck.”

  I asked if he’d left a receipt. Tillie produced it out of an old shoebox. There wasn’t any name—just the words “old cupboard”—so that it didn’t look like he knew what it was worth. There’ve been a few cases recently of dealers being sued when they’ve deliberately misrepresented the value of an item. I reckoned this guy had set himself up as a bumpkin who didn’t know any better.

  “He looked at the parlor sofa that Daddy got from goodwill the year before he died. Said it was just like the one he used to play on when he was a kid,” Tattie volunteered.

  “He wanted that at first until he saw the cupboard. Said he might come back and look at it again,” Tillie added.

  The sofa was from the 1960s and had been bad when it was new. You’d have to pay to have it hauled away. It was a typical dealer ploy: pretend you’re interested in one thing, and then get something you really want cheap. The guy probably made the circuit of old farmhouses at least once a year, probably covering one county per weekend.

  So I explained to the sisters that the cupboard was worth about a thousand dollars. I didn’t tell them that I’d have only paid wholesale, maybe three hundred and fifty dollars at most. After all, I had overhead plus Jack Senior to support. Still, that was a lot more than fifty.

  “Too bad he didn’t leave his name,” I said. It would take forever for him to come back around. Plus the chances of winning a lawsuit weren’t that strong with only about three hundred dollars at stake and the cupboard long gone.

  “But I did get his license number.” Tillie pulled out another sheet of paper. “I wrote it down in case one of us dies before he comes back and the other needs to let him know about the sofa. Maybe you can get his name and phone number from Weevil?”

  I looked at the number—a Virginia tag.

  “Why don’t we sell him something else?” I suggested. “I’ve got this old beat-up 1920s imitation arts and crafts china cupboard—maybe Montgomery Ward or something like that. We could rig it to look like a Gustav Stickley piece. He didn’t make many big things like it. When one shows up, it’s worth a lot.”

  Tillie and Tattie looked at me expectantly. Even Double X looked around to see what they were looking at.

  “We can sell it for a thousand dollars,” I explained, “the full price of what you should have gotten for the milk paint cupboard.” If it were a real Stickley it would be worth over five thousand dollars, so he should pay a thousand without too much fuss.

  Tattie stared at Tillie, then turned to me and asked, “What you want out’n it?”

  I hated dealers like the young man. They gave the whole industry a bad name. Fanny said that I was overly concerned, especially when I let Jack Senior cheat on me. But then I was young enough to defend myself if I wanted. But scamming old people really set me off. “Justice,” I answered. And maybe an extra little vicarious shot at Jack Senior I started to think, before I suppressed it.

  “Good!” Tattie said. “You can get his name when you talk to Weevil about helping with the burglary.”

  “Why can’t you get the name when you call?” I asked.

  “Oh, Weevil does better face to face,” Tattie answered.

  ***

  And face to face, Weevil was something. We were sitting in his patrol pickup in front of the Dairy and Donut, feeding his sweet tooth at my expense and avoiding the prying eyes of the rest of the Sheriff’s Department. The teenagers who hung around the place were not likely to notice Weevil unless he got after one of them with his baseball bat for some sort of mischief. Weevil wasn’t allowed to carry a firearm ever since he shot off his little toe trying to adjudicate a domestic dispute. Instead he carried a bat in the gun rack in front of the back window of the truck. Actually, Weevil was pretty effective with it. He was a male version of Tattie, only bigger and redder. Whereas his late father, Bulldog, had been the same general size but with a head larger than appropriate for his body—hence the name Bulldog—Weevil had a tiny head that would have looked just right on Tillie. There’d been some really odd genetics there. But he tried hard, and, in a jurisdiction where most of the crime was barroom fighting, was good at his job.

  He was tapping his bat on the dashboard and unintentionally pushing his leg up against mine as I sat in the passenger seat. At least, I think it was unintentional, since he actually filled about one and three-quarters seats. Nobody had ever seen him with a woman socially, let alone make a pass at one. He seemed to be a born bachelor. “Aunt Tattie says you want me to spy on the sheriff,” he muttered, looking sideways in my direction.

  “Not spy exactly,” I said, “but I want to make sure the Abernathys don’t get blamed for something they didn’t do. I could go to all the motels and restaurants myself, but I know you and the other deputies have been doing that already, and I was wondering if you would let me know what you find out. It would save a lot of time.” Not to mention that the Sheriff’s Department would likely get more cooperation than I would. I couldn’t decide whether to smile friendly or sexy, so I tried the look I used to give Jack Junior when he won a spelling bee at school.

  It didn’t work. “I’m sworn to uphold the law, and the law and Sheriff Overhouse says we got to keep this investigation to ourselves,” he said.

  “But you bend the law sometimes,” I said “like when you let old Possum Wexler off for hunting out of season.”

  “Well that was because he needed the food. It was life or death.” />
  “So is this,” I said. “Someone was killed and we’re being blamed.” This was overstating the case a little, but you had to be positive. I turned in the seat so I could look straight into his eyes.

  He blushed; he actually blushed. Then went back to tapping the dash. “What’s this about some fellow cheating Aunt Tillie and Tattie?” he asked.

  I explained about the sale, emphasizing the one thousand dollars and asking if he could get the license plate run at Division of Motor Vehicles or wherever.

  “So you want two things. That’s a bunch.”

  “One of them is for your aunts, remember. One thousand dollars is a lot of money.” I paused to let that sink in. “And my family’s reputation is worth something too.”

  “Aw right. I’ll try. For Aunt Tillie and Tattie. But don’t think that just because I help this time, you can ask about any little thing that comes up,” he growled.

  I was opening the door to go back to my van, when he yelled, “Yow,” and hopped out of his side of the truck, clutching his bat and lumbering toward two young males who were trying to tear each other’s head off while a handful of preteen girls, sitting on one of the red and white picnic tables outside the Dairy and Donut, cheered.

  ***

  I made it back to my van unnoticed, went home, had a long bath, and hunkered down, expecting a bad week. Actually, it went pretty well. Jack Senior called about twenty relatives. He’d visited a third cousin, Isobel Turner, in Baltimore, who was only sixty but remembered stories about the secret compartment from her great-grandmother who died at ninety-four in 1958. This great-grandmother had heard from her mother about playing in the chimney when she was a girl in the 1850s, but couldn’t remember any particulars. It turned out that this great-grandmother’s brother was the black sheep of the family, moving to Cleveland, Ohio, to work in the steel mills back during the depression—the one in the 1880s, not the 1930s. Isobel Turner didn’t know if his family knew about the compartment, but they were suspect because they were Yankees. Of course, she had added that she wasn’t a Yankee, because Baltimore was really a Southern city.