Bubba and the Ten Little Loonies

by C. L. Bevill

  Blake Landry hurried by them with a brief, “Hello.” He added, “Can you believe I tripped coming from my car?” Bubba noticed that the man’s shirt and jeans were a little dirty and immediately forgot about it as the social worker went inside.

  Bubba glanced at David and hesitated. The reason Bubba had come to see David was because David had appeared scared earlier in the day. David took on a disguise to return and dig for clues to something he believed was wrong. But David still looked scared.

  “What is it?” Bubba asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I believe that—” the fractious British accent failed— “I’m being set up. You see I was the last person with both people. I played cards with Mrs. Ferryjig, and I had a rousing game of dominoes with Hurley. I was the last one with them, and they seemed very normal to me. In fact, I never would have thought Hurley apt to commit suicide. The doctors didn’t explain the bruises on his upper arms that I saw later. Or the other bruises I noted.”

  Bubba tried to process all of that information. Being the last one to be with both people who died wouldn’t mean much if their deaths truly were what they appeared to be. David wouldn’t lie about how Hurley presented the evening before he committed suicide. However, there was something else that bothered Bubba. “How did you see bruises on Hurley’s body?”

  “Why, when I examined the corpse for clues, Watson,” David said. The halfhearted British accent had returned. “It’s what I wanted you for this morning, but you’re so dratted busy with this wedding nonsense, I couldn’t pry you away. Therefore, I beat feet back to the hospital and had a look at poor deceased Hurley myself. The bruises you see—” he put his hands on Bubba’s biceps to demonstrate the location of the bruises— “were here and here.”

  Bubba looked down. David’s hands were wrapped around Bubba’s upper arms as if he was holding him in place.

  “And there was this—” David paused to reach inside a pocket of the seersucker suit— “a few very sticky threads connected to the underside of one of Hurley’s wrists, combined with some residual redness there.” He produced a small plastic baggie.

  Bubba leaned forward and looked at the threads. “That looks like duct tape,” he said, touching the packet with a finger. The small plastic looked much more professional than the sandwich baggie he’d last used when he’d had a key piece of evidence.

  “Very good, Watson. I have compared it to duct tape found in the handyman’s shed. There is a dozen-roll package with one roll missing. It is the same color and consistency as this sample. I have examined it under a microscope and have determined it is so.”

  “Around his wrists,” Bubba said. Duct tape was a handy piece of equipment to have around. He had duct tape in his truck. His mother had duct tape in several strategic locations in the mansion, but there would be some fierce argument about what her intention might be with such an item, especially if it was placed next to a shovel, a bag of lime, and an old rug. After all, his mother had once claimed to have buried Elgin Snoddy alive. Duct tape would have come in handily.

  Precious trotted up to Bubba holding a foam lawn dart in her mouth. Several of the players cried out with protest. Bubba took the dart away from her and threw it back to the players. One picked up the dart with an index finger and thumb and watched with a disgusted expression as it dripped dog saliva. Precious tossed her ears back and presented Bubba with her back, clearly showing her displeasure with the rejection of her love offering.

  Bubba thought about bruises, wrists, and duct tape.

  “Finally, there’s something terribly amiss,” David said. He pulled an electric device from an interior jacket pocket. Bubba didn’t know what it was, but it looked like a mini-sized computer about the size of a slender book. “This is my Motorola Xoom. It’s an android tablet,” he explained.

  Bubba felt certain that neither Sherlock Holmes nor Nikola Tesla would have used a Motorola Xoom, but he wasn’t going to point it out. While David was fiddling with the tablet, he peripherally noticed patients streaming inside. They appeared to be in a hurry to get somewhere.

  “It’s got both apps for Nook and Kindle,” David pointed out as he pushed the button on the back of the device. The front lit up, and he swiped his finger across it. He turned it so that Bubba could see the screen. It looked like a very large android phone screen. The background had the Droid figure on it. There were a series of apps on the screen that David could access if he so desired. He tapped on one that looked like a globe. “This one is an Internet browser.” Immediately, Google appeared on the screen. Bubba brightened. He knew what Google was; he had used it before. It wasn’t so bad, although he and computers tended to have a volatile relationship. They broke, and he didn’t like it. Or possibly it was that he broke them, and they didn’t like that. It wasn’t really his fault that he tended to be fumble fingered with delicate instruments. Cell phones fell into the same category, and Bubba had no reason to think that tablets wouldn’t be included.

  David tapped a few more times. “I opened this on Wednesday morning, and it was already opened to a page. I had left it in my room and hadn’t used it for a day or so. It was on the charger, but someone opened it and did a few searches.”

  Bubba shrugged. It was a hospital with people constantly coming and going for all kinds of reason. David was fortunate that no one had stolen the device.

  “Here’s the first search I saw,” David said and tapped once. The screen came up with a website on assisted suicide with the search phrase “how to make assisted suicide look like regular suicide” in the box at the top.

  Bubba’s stomach made a noise. The search might as well have been “how to make murder look like suicide.”

  “Then there was this one,” David said and tapped again.

  Bubba looked. The website was plain and innocuous. He leaned his head in to read the first paragraph. David took the tablet and swiped the screen with his thumb and middle finger, which made the entire image larger. He turned it back so Bubba could read it.

  It didn’t make much sense but then Bubba gathered the gist of it as he read “making murder appear like a heart attack.” He read a few more lines and understood that the author also believed in the men in black and aluminum foil caps. Apparently there was a sort of device that used radioactive waves to induce what would look like a heart attack in a person.

  “Does it tell when that search was done?” Bubba asked.

  David tapped again. He looked at the screen and turned it so that Bubba could see the history of the search. “The day that Mrs. Ferryjig had her ‘heart attack.’” He shook his head sadly.

  “And the date on the suicide one?”

  David tapped again and then swiped with the same finger. “Tuesday morning,” he said.

  Bubba glowered. This was sounding worse and worse. He hadn’t found a dead body this time. This time, the dead bodies had found him. Actually, David had found the dead bodies and then come to find Bubba, which meant that Bubba was like a great honking dead body magnet.

  “Of course, the problem being that I didn’t do these searches,” David said. “Not on my Xoom, not anywhere. Bob’s your uncle!”

  Bubba’s stomach made a viciously uncomfortable noise. It sounded like two corn dogs vying for kennel space in there. “Sherlock dint do these searches?” he asked. Corn dogs sounded very good at the moment, especially if they were dipped in Italian dressing mixed with peanut butter.

  “No. Not Sherlock. Not Nikola. Not David,” David said, and it was at that moment that Bubba truly became concerned. “I did not do these searches. Someone came into my room the day before each death and did these searches. Then they left the Xoom where they had found it. It was a case of jiggery-pokery to be sure.”

  “Are there any other searches on there?”

  “Yes, and it isn’t really wondrous news.”

  Chapter 8

  Bubba and the Mounting Evidence of Wrongdoing

  Saturday, April 6th

  “Kin you erase those
searches?” Bubba asked.

  “I could, but it’s proof of something I dare not speak aloud. I would be totally gobsmacked.”

  “You already spoke it aloud. Someone’s dropping a dime on you. Any minute and there’ll be an anonymous telephone call that tells Sheriff John that them deaths aren’t really what they think they are, that you were the last one with these folks, and then they’ll start searching for stuff. They’ll find your Xoom, they’ll look at the history, and wham, you’re in jail with Newt Durley down the hall trying to kill the toilet in a way that no one on the cell block will ever forget.” Bubba shuddered. His stomach made another impatient noise. “I’ve got to get something to eat, David. Kin we hit the cafeteria?”

  “But of course, my good man,” David said. He punched a button on the back of the Xoom and slid the entire device back into the interior jacket pocket. “It’s taco night. If we don’t hurry, we’ll miss the black bean surprise.”

  Bubba turned toward the hospital’s exterior door, and there was a muffled boom. His head swiveled back. It sounded like the quarry was blasting again, but it hadn’t been worked for twelve or thirteen years.

  David said, “It sounded like a sonic boom. You know I was in Dallas when the space shuttle Columba broke up. It sounded like three sonic booms. Or perhaps it was four. We didn’t know what it was until the news people on CNN told us later.” He had lost his British accent again. “You never know what you have until it’s too late.”

  “Does Howdy Doody have wooden balls?” Bubba asked rhetorically.

  David tilted his head. “I would imagine that he did.”

  “Food,” Bubba told David. “Then we’ll talk to the head guy in charge.”

  * * *

  Taco night was an unqualified success. Everyone liked tacos. The sauce in the hamburger was just right. The tomatoes and lettuce were fresh. The cheese was cheddar and shredded. The shells were crisp and crumbled just the way Bubba liked them.

  When he was done eating, he asked to borrow David’s cellphone. He wanted to call Willodean and his mother to make sure they weren’t worrying about him. (Willodean had given him a cellphone. It was a very nice one. It even had an app on it that was a flashlight, although it drained the battery dead in under two minutes. It was in his nightstand drawer because he often forgot to bring it with him. He also forgot to charge it which made it difficult to use when he did remember to bring it with him.) Furthermore, he wanted to tell Willodean that they might need to look into the deaths a little more. It seemed unlikely that anyone could really make someone appear to have a heart attack, but it wasn’t unheard of to attempt to make a murdered person appear to have committed suicide.

  It was most likely that someone was yanking David’s neurotic little chains in a perverse manner.

  David shoved a half of a taco into his mouth while reaching into his seersucker suit for the phone. He produced it and slid it over to Bubba. (How many electronic devices did David have on his person? Only God and David knew.)

  Bubba took a whole minute to figure out how to turn on the cellphone. He would have asked David, but the other man was deep in conversation with a woman wearing a red silk robe and a matching headband. It took Bubba another minute to figure out that David was attempting to flirt with the woman but failing miserably because the fortysomething woman wasn’t interested in how David could deduce her occupation and habits. It seemed odd that David was in the pursuit of female companionship while being framed, but possibly that was the way he compartmentalized.

  Finally, Bubba punched in Willodean’s cellphone number and put the phone to his ear. He didn’t hear anything. He pulled it away and looked at it. He tried it again. Nothing.

  “Cellphone coverage in this area is sketchy at best,” a man across the table said.

  “It ain’t getting anything,” Bubba complained.

  The man shrugged. He pulled out a cellphone from his pocket. He was somewhat normal in appearance with a plain t-shirt, plain jeans, and a bland expression on his face. (Normal was something Bubba had learned was a sliding scale of epic proportion.) He punched and tapped. Ten seconds later, he said, “No signal. No surprise. Try out on the lawn. The north end. That’s the end closest to the tower. I couldn’t believe they only have one cellphone tower in this area. Every time there’s a thunderstorm, we can’t make calls. I can’t make Facebook posts, and I certainly can’t tweet. It’s horrible.”

  Bubba bussed his own tray and wandered out to the north lawn with David’s phone. Precious followed at a stroll. She’d gotten her fair share of hamburger. One of the chefs had come out to give her an unseasoned portion. The other patients had also oohhed and ahhed over the canine to the extent that she was about to bite the next hand that reached for her chin. Precious was unmistakably happy to escape with her master.

  Bubba tried the phone again.

  No signal. Bubba held it in the air and peered at the screen. No signal. He shook the phone. No signal. He went ten paces to the north. No signal. He went ten paces to the east. No signal. He did a little rainmaking dance that a Native American friend of Miz Demetrice’s had taught him while they were protesting construction on a sacred site in Central Texas. No signal.

  Abruptly, there was a muffled boom immediately followed by another one. Bubba glanced around. No space shuttles were apparent. But a few seconds later a cloud of blackness billowed up from the south, a mushroom cloud reminiscent of a nuclear blast.

  “What the heck?” Bubba muttered. A few patients came out to see what was happening. A nurse followed. They stared at the black smoke. The nurse tried her cellphone. She said, “Damn. No signal.” She hurried back inside with a, “I’ll use the landline to notify the authorities. Of what, I don’t even want to guess.”

  Bubba eyed the smoke. He made a decision and turned toward the parking lot. He would get in the truck and go see what had just exploded.

  “OH THANK all the gods of fashion and wedding design!” someone said as he stumbled out of the bushes to Bubba’s right. It was Peyton the wedding planner, and his silk shirt was rumpled and torn. His slacks were dirty and ripped. He had part of a branch sticking through his hair. His makeup was askew.

  “Peyton?” Bubba said unnecessarily.

  “Bubba!” Peyton cried out unnecessarily. “The Charger got stuck just past the bridge. Did you know there’s a cellphone tower that fell down? It’s across the road. I mean, it’s lying across the road. This would never happen in New York City. I mean, it’s bad enough when you get a hot dog without mustard and relish. But this?”

  “Did you go through the trees?”

  “I have Gucci loafers on, man,” Peyton said. “If I walk on the asphalt they’ll need to be re-soled.” He pulled the branch from his hair and tossed it. “Of course, it might be better than being chased by a horde of squirrels.” He fanned himself with his hand. “I have no idea why the little rodents were so angry with me. I’m not into nuts except for almonds.”

  The downed cellphone tower explained why there weren’t any signals. It also explained the first boom. He hadn’t seen any smoke from that one.

  Bubba sighed. There was always a time when he thought about coincidence and what that meant in relationship to what was happening. An overdose by drugs that a man didn’t have wasn’t a coincidence. Someone planting searches on a notepad wasn’t coincidence. A muffled boom and then later someone saying that the cellphone tower was lying across the road weren’t coincidences.

  “Come on,” Bubba said. Precious barked once, and Peyton shrugged.

  Bubba found his truck without further ado. It even started up without having to do a special prayer. Peyton patted Precious on the head while he held onto the side of the door, muttering, “Aren’t all vehicles supposed to have seatbelts?”

  David showed up just as Bubba was backing out. Bubba stopped the truck, and David climbed in. It was a tight fit with three grown men and a Bassett hound on a bench seat, but Precious sprawled over David and Peyton’s laps and stuck her
head out the window.

  “It dint come with seatbelts when it was made in 1954,” Bubba said as he backed up. “Did you see anyone down by the cellphone tower?”

  “There was a hunk of metal on the road,” Peyton said. “No one was about. Did you hear that other boom?”

  “There’s the smoke,” David said, pointing. The sun was on its last legs, but the billowing cloud was clear in the skies as it went upward. “I deduce that something is amiss. Possibly something has been blown up by means nefarious.”

  “The cellphone tower looked kind of blown up,” Peyton said. “No one ever said Texas would be so exciting. Did you know your scar is coming off?” he asked David.

  “Did you know your wings are smudged?” David said promptly.

  “Urg,” Peyton muttered and produced a compact with a mirror. “Good God, I look like a besmirched drag queen on the morning after.”

  “Peyton, why are you here?” Bubba asked.

  “Your mother and Willodean’s mother decided on the bridesmaids’ dresses. I just wanted to run it past you,” he replied, dabbing at his eyes with a silk handkerchief he had produced from nothingness. “And I won’t mention that Miz Demetrice and Miz Celestine…now you’ve got me calling them with the southern honorific…were discussing whether they could shoot the nose hairs off a denuded cicada at fifty feet. They were drinking glasses of wine like they were Kool-Aid, and Miz Demetrice was talking about a very special gun she’d been saving for a rainy day.” He waved his hands briefly, and the handkerchief dropped to his lap. “Not that there’s any rain about.”

  “Yeah, well, Ma has a liking for all things NRA,” Bubba said.

  “She probably meant the Bergmann 1986 pistol she recently acquired,” David said. “It has a complete lack of any mechanical system of ejection. One hopes that the fired shell bounces off the next bullet. Sometimes it’s a complete balls up and jams the mechanism.”