What Are You Wearing to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  He opened his desk drawer and tossed the cuffs in. “I’ll take them over tomorrow.”

  I hobbled toward the car behind him. “I will get revenge, you know, as soon as I figure out how.”

  He laughed.

  As we drove home, I pointed out, “You realize you wasted this grand gesture, don’t you? Starr Knight was in the truck, but she wasn’t murdered. She was most likely driving under the influence and didn’t make the curve. I have no reason nor inclination to get involved.”

  Which just goes to show: A judge should never pronounce the verdict until all the evidence is in.

  4

  Friday I holed up in my office and compensated for Thursday’s leisure. Since Joe Riddley had a midday meeting, I went home to eat alone. Clarinda, our cook, was at a meeting of her sorority and had left food on the stove. I didn’t see a single soul except Gladys until midafternoon, and she was a morose woman, not inclined to chitchat with customers or with me. That’s why it was only when a sheriff’s deputy came in around two thirty with a warrant she wanted me to sign that I heard the latest dreadful news.

  As I handed her warrant back, I noted, “You seem a tad distraught today—or is it distrait? I never can remember the difference.”

  She rubbed one hand back and forth across her mouth like she was trying to get rid of a bitter taste. “I went to school with Starr, so this has shaken me some.”

  “It is very sad,” I agreed.

  “Sad? It’s depraved. I mean, who would beat somebody to death like that?”

  My jaw dropped.

  She took a step back. “You mean you didn’t know?”

  My stomach felt like somebody had kicked me. “I heard it was an accident.”

  “It was no accident. It was dark before we got her out of that truck, but we found that somebody broke her legs, arms, back, and neck. It must have been a madman.”

  “And he’s still walking around out there somewhere?” Walker’s two kids were at the age where they liked to roam the town with their friends. How safe were they? How safe were any of us?

  “We’ll get him. The sheriff is pulling out all the stops. Right now they’re going over the truck for evidence and trying to find people who saw her after Monday afternoon, when it was stolen. But you know something odd?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You knew Starr, right? Not what you’d call sedate.”

  “No, I’d never have called her sedate.”

  “You know what she was wearing when she died?”

  “A white shirt or something?”

  “A white button-down oxford-cloth shirt, black polyester slacks—baggy ones, at that—and black low-heeled shoes. I saw her right after they took her out of the truck, and she could have been a nun.”

  I considered the unlikely outfit. “Could Trevor explain it?”

  “Nope. He said he wouldn’t have thought Starr would be caught dead looking so respectable. Then he remembered she had.”

  That curdled my gizzard. “I’ll be praying that you find him,” I promised.

  As she started to leave, I said, “Wait.” I opened Joe Riddley’s drawer and handed her Buster’s cuffs. “Take these back to Sheriff Gibbons. He may need them. And if I see even a shadow of a smile on your face, you are going to be in big trouble.”

  “No, ma’am. I’m not smiling. I’ll deliver them.”

  She held her snicker until she was out the door.

  I couldn’t sit there and dwell on routine work. I kept thinking about what Starr must have suffered. “What we need is a walk,” I told Lulu. “Want to go to the bank?”

  I put her on the leash, stopped by the register to pick up the pitiful receipts for the day, and turned toward the corner with the light. I had to tug on Lulu’s leash to make her follow. The bank is directly across from our store, next to Spence’s Appliances, and she preferred to jaywalk.

  “As a judge, I need to set a good example,” I reminded her. “It’s only half a block more each way.”

  As we waited for the light to change, I glanced over across the street and smiled in anticipation. An ancient navy Cadillac sat in the handicapped space in front of the bank, a Cadillac that used to belong to Pooh DuBose, widow of Lafayette DuBose, before her death. Now Augusta Wainwright, Pooh’s oldest friend and our town’s leading aristocrat, relied on it and its driver, Otis Raeburn, for her transportation. Gusta might be old, but she was still hardy, and she and the bank security guard had a running feud about her right to park in the bank’s handicapped spot without a handicapped tag.

  “Good,” I told Lulu. “We’ll be in time for the matinee.”

  “Ma’am?” A young man I had never seen before thrust a well-worn wallet-sized photograph under my nose. “I’m sorry to bother you, but have you ever seen this woman? I’m trying to find my wife.” His brown eyes were anxious.

  Lulu sniffed his cuffs while I took the photograph and studied it. The woman had wide blue eyes, enhanced lashes, enhanced lips, and probably an enhanced bosom. Her bottle-blond hair was arranged in one of those wild, curly styles that always make me think the woman either just got out of bed or ought to belong to a prehistoric cave community. You couldn’t have proved by that picture that she had a stitch on.

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He’d have to be crazy to expect somebody like that to blend into Hopemore, but he didn’t look crazy, just very ordinary. He was tall and slender, with coppery hair cut close to his head and the erect carriage I associate with military men.

  “Somebody that glamorous would stand out a mile around here. I haven’t seen anybody who looks like she ought to be in movies.”

  “She is beautiful.” His hand trembled as he stroked the picture. It looked like a familiar gesture. “She went missing a year ago, while I was in Afghanistan. I was with the Tenth Mountain Division, stationed at Fort Drum in upstate New York?”

  He made it a question, and waited for me to show some recognition of the base or the division. I hadn’t heard of either one, but I nodded, to encourage him. He seemed to need to talk.

  “I was short when I went over—due to get out a few months after I got back—but Bertie was real homesick. I guess she couldn’t wait. She gave up our apartment and disappeared. I’ve been looking for her ever since.”

  “Georgia’s a long way from upstate New York.”

  “I know, but she was from the South. I met her when I was in basic training at Fort Gordon, and one of my buddies thought he saw her in Augusta a month or so ago. I’ve been looking around there and in all the nearby towns. I’m afraid she might have lost her memory or something.”

  My guess was that she had decided an ordinary young man wasn’t what she wanted, but she wasn’t likely to find much excitement in Hopemore. I felt so sorry for him that I offered, “Leave your name and contact information at the feed-and-seed store over there, and if we see her, we’ll let you know.”

  “Here’s my card.” It had been printed on a computer. His name was Grady Handley, and the area code was the same as ours.

  “You’re not still stationed in New York?”

  “No, ma’am. I got out in June, and I’ve been looking for Bertie ever since. When I heard she might be down here, I got a temporary place to stay while I look around.”

  The light changed. He wandered down the sidewalk in search of other highly unlikely leads, and I hurried toward the bank.

  Before I went in, I peeped in the open window of Gusta’s car. As I had expected, Otis sat behind the wheel, cap pulled down over his eyes so he didn’t have to meet the glare of Vern, the bank’s security guard, through the double glass doors.

  “What you know, Otis?” I greeted him.

  He took off his cap and inclined his head, his face creased in a smile. “Hey, Judge, I saw you crossing the street and was hoping you’d stop. Do you have a minute? I got a problem I need to discuss with somebody, and you’re the very one I’d choose.”

  Lot
s of people confuse magistrates with lawyers or think they can get advice free from a judge when they’d have to pay a lawyer. Otis was no freeloader, though, and I couldn’t imagine him breaking the law. We don’t tend to arrest people in Hopemore for driving ten miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile zone. “I’ve got a few minutes. Shall I get in and sit down?”

  “Why, sure.” He gestured with a hand the same soft dusty brown as pecan shells. “Make yourself to home.”

  I tied Lulu to the pole of the handicapped parking sign and slid into the passenger seat, the least-used seat in the vehicle since Pooh died. Gusta sat in back, as was fitting for a reigning monarch. “What’s on your mind?”

  Otis was past eighty, still preached each Sunday in one of the small black churches in town, and was one of the most courtly men I had ever known. Before he got down to his problem, he insisted on observing the formalities. “How you doing, Judge?”

  I opined I was doing fine and asked after his wife, Lottie. He opined she was fine, too. “So what’s bothering you today?” I asked.

  “Two things, actually. I can’t seem to get my mind around what’s happened to Starr.”

  I was surprised at his familiar use of her name. “You knew her?” Since Starr and her family lived outside of town, I couldn’t imagine how Otis had gotten acquainted with them.

  “Oh, yes, from before the time Starr was born. I used to drive Miss Winifred and Mister Fayette’s animals over for Mister Trevor to mount the heads.” Otis and Lottie were the only two people in town who ever called Pooh by her given name.

  “I knew Pooh and Lafayette were avid hunters, but I hadn’t realized they’d mounted the heads of animals they’d shot.”

  “My, yes. They had a regular competition going to see who could bag the best-looking one. When I took the animals over, Starr would come running. She loved knock-knock jokes.”

  “What did you do with the heads afterwards?” I’d been in Pooh’s house thousands of time, and I never saw a mounted head.

  “I’d take them up to the lake house Mister Fayette built for himself and his buddies, and hang them on the wall. I reckon they got twenty buck heads up there by now, plus a couple of boars, and one antelope Miss Winifred bagged out west.” He chuckled. “Mister Fayette was some put out that she got an antelope and he didn’t. I don’t know what Jed will do with the place now. He’s not much into hunting or fishing.” Jed DuBose, an attorney in town, was Pooh’s grandson and heir. “Still, Mister Trevor is an artist at what he does. It would be a shame to throw them away.”

  That seemed like a good segue back to our original subject. “So you knew Starr pretty well.”

  “You could say that. We laughed and carried on a lot. I had to rescue her from a tree one afternoon when she climbed higher than she could get down from and didn’t like to call her mama. Her mama was right strict on her.” He hesitated. “Starr got a little wild after her mama died, but I always figured she’d grow out of that. She was such a sweet-natured child. Children tend to revert to their natures when they grow up. She just didn’t get a chance to grow up.”

  That gave us cause for a minute of silence, but Otis wasn’t finished dredging up memories yet. “When Starr was real little, mind how she used to ride with her daddy in his green pickup down Oglethorpe Street? She was like a princess, waving to everybody on both sides.” He lifted one hand and gave a regal wave. “Her curls used to shine like sunshine. ’Course, he spoiled her, buying her everything under the sun, but he never let her be rude to another person. One day in the grocery store there was only one Snickers bar left in the box. I was reaching for it when Starr said, ‘Daddy, I want that candy bar.’ I drew back, like, to let her have it, but Mister Trevor said, ‘No, honey. Mister Otis already claimed it. You pick another kind.’ And she picked up that candy bar and handed it to me with the prettiest smile, and she said, ‘Here, Mister Otis. I like peanut butter cups, too.’ Such a sweet child.” He closed his eyes, and a tear escaped and rolled to his jaw. “Nobody had cause to be so vicious to that sweet child.”

  I heartily agreed with him. “You’re a preacher. What do you think goes so terribly wrong in a person that he can do cruel things to somebody else? Is that part of some people’s makeup from the second they are born? Or do they learn it from cruelty others have shown them?”

  “I don’t rightly know, Judge, but I do know this. Anybody who doesn’t believe in evil hasn’t looked around very far. They’s something in the universe that feeds on violence, and it’s more than human. And it will latch on to and take over any human willing to let it.”

  “Somebody sure let it take them over this week.”

  “You got that right. It distresses me mightily to think of Starr dying that way. I will never forget her waving to strangers on the sidewalk and giving up her candy bar so I could have it.” He wiped one hand across his face, and his finger glistened with tears.

  I felt a lump in my throat. Seemed to me Starr had just had the most heartfelt eulogy she was likely to get.

  We sat in silence while a fly buzzed in through my window and out through his.

  “You mentioned you had two things bothering you?”

  He approached the matter crabwise, from the side. “Well, it’s like this. I talked to Jed earlier this afternoon.” He came to a dead stop, as if unsure how to go on.

  “What’s Jed done now?”

  Pooh’s grandson might now be one of the best lawyers in Hopemore, but he had been a mischievous boy and was a mischievous man. Otis had been getting him out of scrapes since he could walk. I figured he had gotten himself into another scrape and sent Otis to make things right. I figured wrong.

  “He’s not done anything. It was Miss Winifried. Seems like when she died”—Otis stopped and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny throat—“she left Lottie and me what you might call a little windfall. A big windfall, actually.” He lowered his head and stared at his clasped hands, which were shaking. “I never expected it from her, but she’s left us enough to buy us a house, see some of the world, and keep Lottie comfortable after I’m gone. I can’t get over it. I surely can’t.”

  Lottie was nearly twenty years younger than he, so that must be some windfall.

  “You took care of Pooh all her married life, and look at all you and Lottie did for her after she got so sick and forgetful. I think that was utterly fair.”

  Otis spoke what we both knew. “Fair don’t generally come into it where money’s concerned. You might think Jed would be upset at our getting so much, but he seems pleased as punch about it.”

  Considering that Pooh had left Jed the controlling interest in the nationwide trucking company her husband had founded, he wasn’t going to miss any meals because of Otis’s inheritance. Besides, he was married to Augusta Wainwright’s only granddaughter. Between them, he and Meriwether could probably buy up several countries and still have pocket change. Otis, however, was as touched by Jed’s generosity as he had been by Pooh’s.

  “He says we can stay right where we are if we want to, until they decide what to do with Miss Winifred’s house, but if we find a place we like, he’ll handle all the business side of buying it, for nothing. That is one fine family, Judge. One fine family. And Miss Winifred—” He choked and his lips worked. He pressed his knuckles to them and said in a voice clogged with tears, “Seems like I can’t get used to her being gone.”

  My own eyes filled. “I can’t either. She was one of the sweetest people this town ever knew.”

  “I keep seeing her all over the place. Handing out cookies to children from her porch after school, working in the yard in that big floppy hat and giving me what-for if I pruned the bushes too short, looking for her scruffy black pocketbook so she could go down to read to children in the hospital, playing with that big old dog she used to have…When she was alive, she stayed in one place. Now, seems like she’s all over the house at once. Lottie and I both feel it.” He covered his eyes and tears fell between his fingers. I handed him a
tissue and pulled out one for myself.

  For another couple of minutes we sat grieving together for a very special lady. Otis was a most comfortable person to grieve with.

  “So what’s the problem?” I didn’t want us to be sitting there bawling when Gusta came out and the show began.

  “It’s Miss Gusta and Mr. Hubert I’m concerned about. They’s nowhere for them to go.”

  Two years before, when Meriwether had inherited a house from her daddy and moved out of her grandmother’s antebellum home, Gusta had moved in with Pooh, and they had turned the big yellow Victorian house into a private retirement home. Hubert Spence, who used to live down the road from us, had paid for an elevator to be installed and moved in with them. Hubert was a widower and a heart-attack survivor, so it was no longer wise for him to live alone. And though Pooh and Gusta had both been over eighty and Hubert was in his late sixties, they seemed to get along fine. Hubert boasted that he could walk to Spence’s Appliances, and he basked in the attentions of Otis, Lottie, and Gusta’s longtime housekeeper, Florine.

  Pooh’s death in May had left a vacancy at their house as well as a big hole in my heart. I had been wondering what Hubert and Gusta would do. To my shame, it hadn’t occurred to me that Otis and Lottie might like to make some changes, too. Typically, Otis was worried about the others.

  “You know Florine can’t manage that big house by herself, even if she was of a mind to, which she isn’t. She’s used to mostly doing for Miss Gusta. They’s no way she’s gonna take on all the cooking and cleaning plus laundry for Mr. Hubert. Lottie could keep working there, of course, even if we had our own place, but I’d kinda like to take her to see some of the world while I’m still able. I’d like to see some of those places Miss Winifred visited and talked about. I’d like to see Mali again, too.” His voice was wistful.

  Pooh had not been your ordinary world traveler. Her trips generally took her to remote villages where her dollars were at work building schools, clinics, housing, or roads. Now that Otis mentioned it, I recalled that his congregation had held a musical event to help Pooh put a water system in a village in Mali. Afterwards, Pooh had surprised him and Lottie by taking them and two other couples from their congregation to see the finished product.