The Main Corpse

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “I just don’t get it,” I said aloud. At the exit to the upscale Genesee area, I wondered if the De Groot-Hersey investigative team was spending any time over at Tony Royce’s house in Eagle Mountain Estates. His place was near Albert’s. Perhaps the cops were still up at the campsite, or, for that matter, at Marla’s house. Actually, I rather favored the idea of them being out in the rain.

  Once I exited to Aspen Meadow, I passed a popular creekside picnic site that had been claimed by the over-flowing Cottonwood. This was probably the place Sam Perdue and his sprained-ankle customer in the ambulance had encountered the near-drowned child. I shuddered. Water had boiled above the edges of the creekbed and now ran freely through a wide area of flattened grass. It gushed up the sides of a picnic table and bench. On the far side of the site, the grill stood just a few inches higher than what now looked like a fast-flowing river.

  I wondered where Albert Lipscomb was at this very moment. I hoped that he, too, was soaking wet and suffering. Suffering abysmally.

  I began driving down the new, recently widened highway that led to Aspen Meadow’s Main Street, eight miles away. Mountain residents had bitterly fought the widening of this byway, formerly a tortuous two-way road. A broader route would bring more unwanted people, with their blight of problems, to our little burg, the protesters claimed. These invaders would drive away wildlife, wildlife that was viewed by a preponderance of Aspen Meadow residents as being a higher life-form than humans. Now, with the clouds lifted just above the treetops, the tawny meadows on each side of the road looked deserted. Suddenly, though, the meadow seemed to shiver. I slowed and pulled the van onto the muddy shoulder. Moving deliberately across the sodden grass was a herd of elk, maybe forty head. Half a dozen calves trod haltingly next to their mothers on impossibly thin, delicate legs. Coming from the East Coast, Marla and I treasured this kind of sight. Lord, how I wanted her back.

  I revved up the van and drove home. Without Marla to talk to and plan with, and without Tom to give me updates, I felt anchorless.

  I’d been on the periphery of some of Tom’s cases before. From time to time, I’d even become more involved than he would have liked. But with my friend under arrest, things didn’t look promising for my taking merely a benign interest in the case. I sighed. My idea might not be feasible. It certainly wasn’t legal. But what was the alternative? Go home and wait for your friend to call. It might as well have been. Go home and wait for your friend to have a heart attack. Go home and wait for us to maltreat her. Go home and wait for our captain to convict her of murder.

  I ran toward my front door. I had to do something for Marla, because nobody else would.

  “Gosh, Mom, where have you been?” Arch demanded as he came bounding down the stairs with Jake’s long, nut-brown body at his heels.

  “Did you get hold of Marla?” I demanded. Jake gave me his usual mournful, slobbery look.

  “Yes, and I told her to eat Jell-O,” Arch said. “She said you’d better bring her Epipen down to the jail. She said you’d know what that was.” His face lengthened. “Mom, she said she was miserable.”

  My weight of guilt doubled. “Any other messages?”

  “General Bo called. We had a nice talk. He asked all about how I was doing and about Jake.” He paused to pat the hound reassuringly. “Anyway, Bo kept saying he wanted to talk to you had. He’s on his way over.”

  “Really?” It was just past three o’clock. I had lots to do, but I needed to talk to Arch. “Listen, lion, I want you to hear this from me instead of from your friends. Tony Royce is missing from the camping trip he took with Marla. The police think Marla hurt Tony. They arrested her this morning, and that’s why she’s in jail—”

  “Yeah,” he said, interrupting me, “Marla told me. I turned on the news, but there wasn’t anything. Do you suppose the arrest will be in this week’s copy of The Mountain Journal?”

  I had no idea whether Marla was a big enough fish to warrant news coverage, even from our weekly excuse for a paper. I certainly hoped not.

  “Probably not, lion. Arch, uh, may I borrow Jake?”

  His face clouded. He clasped Jake’s collar and the two of them awkwardly backed away from me. “Why?” His voice cracked. “For how long?”

  “Well, he needs to be part of the thing I’m planning with Marla. But I want you to stay home, because it might be dangerous.”

  “No,” he said stiffly, His fingers held Jake’s collar in a death grip. “You’re not taking him. He’s my dog and he trusts me. Jake was mistreated by his last handler. What do you want him to do? I’m his handler now. He won’t perform well for anyone but me.”

  “Oh, please, Arch, I’m not going to mistreat him, and this is for Marla—”

  Arch turned to go up the stairs. “C’mon Jake, let’s go to my room.”

  “Wait, honey, wait.” He stopped and gave me a hostile gaze. “Okay, Arch, you can come. But you have to promise to obey me if we get into a dicey situation.”

  “Dicey how?”

  “I’m not quite sure yet. Please just go pack up clothes for an overnight. As if you were going camping,” I added.

  I ran up to Tom’s and my room. The clock said three-fifteen. Dicey how? Good question. I packed some warm clothes. In the kitchen, I loaded paper bags with Jake’s spare leash, kibble, homemade dog biscuits, and large plastic bags as well as small ones that zipped closed. I scribbled a note to Tom, telling him not to worry, no matter what happened. Then I glanced around the room—what could I have forgotten? Oh, yes.

  “Arch!” I called up the stairs. “I need you to bring all your fake blood!”

  While he was objecting, the front doorbell rang. Arch, Jake, and I arrived at the door simultaneously, and a quick glance through the peephole revealed General Bo Farquhar in a black sweat suit and heavy jacket. At least it wasn’t camouflage gear. Arch turned off the alarm system and opened the door.

  “Well,” Bo boomed as he stepped inside, “long time no see! As in less than five days.”

  It might as well have been five months. Miraculously, General Bo’s distracted air had vanished, as had his slumping posture and three-day growth of beard. He was freshly shaven, and I wondered how he could have become so tanned, given all the rain we’d been having. If his face seemed older for his prison ordeal and his bout with depression, he now had a firmness in his facial muscles that spoke of new resolve. Apparently the compound did have a barber. He’d had his pale blond hair cut so short he was almost bald. His pale blue eyes, cloudy and unfocused when I had visited him at the compound, now possessed the razor clarity and mesmerizing intensity I knew of old. He quietly closed the door behind him.

  “Hello there. General. How’s your ankle?”

  He shrugged dismissively and held out his hands. “My dear Goldy. Arch, my buddy.”

  I shook his right hand, but Arch opened his arms and threw himself against the general’s chest. Bo embraced him warmly.

  “Wow! I can’t believe it’s really you!” Arch exclaimed as Jake gave a low, suspicious woof. My son pulled away. “This is my bloodhound, Jake. Jake, meet General Bo Farquhar.”

  I shook my head in disbelief as Bo stooped and put both his hands under Jake’s chin. He said, “Jake, I’m very happy to meet you.” The dog whined joyfully and wagged his entire body.

  The general turned his ice blue gaze on me. “You want to tell me what your plan is?”

  “What plan?” asked Arch. “What kind of Jell-O plan using Jake needs fake blood?”

  Quickly, I outlined the essentials of how I thought we might be able to clear Marla.

  “Gosh, Mom,” Arch commented when I finished, “Tom is going to be so ticked off with you.”

  “That’s something I’ll just have to risk,” I said. “First we need to make a stop at Marla’s house.”

  It took longer than I expected to pack up the jet black Jeep Grand Cherokee General Bo Farquhar had borrowed from someone at the compound. I led the way in my van; Bo and Arch followed in
the Jeep. By the time we reached Marla’s house it was just after five o’clock. Fog still curled through her garden, and the house looked ominously deserted.

  I hopped out of the van and approached General Bo, who had put on sunglasses despite the fog. His commando outfit, no doubt. I said, “Can you stay here with Arch? Explain to anyone who comes along that I’m just getting a few things to take to Marla?”

  “Absolutely,” he replied.

  “What if somebody comes along and starts giving you a hard time?” I asked dubiously.

  “No one’s going to come along, Goldy.” He lowered the sunglasses and gave me his spellbinding gaze. “But if they do, I have a nine millimeter semiautomatic Glock under my jacket. Want to see it?”

  Arch said, “Yes.”

  I said, “No.”

  There were no police ribbons barring entry to Chez Marla. At least I wasn’t breaking any laws. Yet. I grabbed the spare key and two large plastic bags I’d brought and walked purposefully up the front steps. Once inside, I retrieved the Epipen, an autoinjector containing epinephrine, from the upstairs bathroom. The label read: For emergency intramuscular use. Cardiac patients may experience dangerous side effects. Use only under care of a physician. I wrapped the injector in a hand towel, put it into the plastic bag, then stuffed a warm change of clothes for Marla on top, I looked around her still-messy bedroom and tried to remember what she’d said to the cops this morning. He has his own closet here.

  I strode quickly into the green-yellow-and-white guest room and pulled open the two-doored closet. The first side yielded four plastic-covered hangers from the dry cleaner, each with slacks and suits. I yanked on the second door, where a single hanger held a pair of blue pants I knew to be Tony’s. It looked as if he’d worn them once, wrinkled them slightly, then hung them neatly until Marla’s maid could send them out to the cleaners.

  “Hallelujah,” I breathed. I put my hand into the remaining plastic bag and, touching the slacks only through the bag, carefully slipped them off their hanger. Then I clutched the bag upside down until the plastic fell like a shroud over the pants. I twisted the plastic hard and prayed that this would work.

  Once we were out on Interstate 70, General Bo kept a two-car distance behind my van. Down through the gray mist we followed the road, until we passed the exit for the sheriff’s department. Just after the highway reentry from that exit, I signaled and pulled onto a slice of shoulder. Following my instructions, Arch and Jake bounded out of the Jeep and stationed themselves twenty yards above us, where they had a good view of the interstate. Arch signaled us with a flashlight Bo had given him. It was nearly six o’clock. I prayed that this harebrained scheme would work.

  Dinner was being served at the jail. I tried to picture Marla: She would have been fingerprinted and put in an orange prisoner suit. Right now she could be eating the Jell-O. Lime Jell-O: the gelled substance that contained artificial food coloring, specifically Yellow No. 5. Because Marla was allergic to that dye, it would close her throat, cause her to break out in hives, and make breathing difficult. The cops might disbelieve Marla if she feigned a heart attack, but there was no way a person could fake the physiological signs of an allergic reaction. And any nurse worth his or her salt would know that an extreme allergic reaction in a former cardiac patient was not something to fool around with.

  The jail authorities would have to send her to the hospital. I was pinning all my hopes on Sam Perdue’s report: The parents flagged down the ambulance, and the EMT gave the kid mouth-to-mouth and CPR. They have to do that when it’s a matter of life and death. It was yet to be seen how convincing Bo and I could be in doing a life-and-death scene.

  Six-fifteen came and went. With my face pressed against the van window, I watched for Arch’s signal through the fog. Both Bo and I had left our car lights blinking; I fervently hoped that would be enough to keep people from pulling over to see if we needed help. Behind the wheel of the Jeep, General Bo looked serene. To him, this was probably routine covert operations.

  At six-forty, I was about to give up. She hadn’t eaten the Jell-O, she hadn’t had a reaction, they weren’t sending her to the hospital. And then an arc of light from my son, as well as the distant sound of sirens, said otherwise. I waved to the general and he revved his engine. I hopped out of the van, ran up past the Jeep, and watched as Bo signaled to get back on the road. No one was coming, thank God. Only the ambulance. With, I hoped, the department standard for a female prisoner: one paramedic driver, one female guard.

  Bo accelerated rapidly. There was a crunch of metal and crash of breaking glass as he rammed my empty van into the road barrier. He leapt out of the Jeep and flung himself down on the pavement next to the rear of my crumpled vehicle. I trotted down to him, opened Arch’s bottle of fake blood, and poured it out—first on Bo’s face, chest, and legs, then on my face and hands.

  And not a moment too soon. The ambulance slowed as it approached the scene of our ‘accident.’ I jumped up and waved my arms.

  “Help!” I cried. “Help! My husband’s been hit!” I motioned wildly and shrieked, “Stop, or he’s going to die!”

  The ambulance swerved and came to a stuttering halt on the shoulder. Bo murmured to me, “Just get out of the way when the paramedic arrives. Let me handle this.”

  A uniformed paramedic vaulted out of the ambulance and trotted toward us. “Okay, ma’am, can you make it down to the ambulance? Just move back and let me take a look at your husband.”

  I moved awkwardly to the shoulder as the ambulance driver knelt over General Bo Farquhar. I didn’t even see how Bo managed to grasp the man’s shirt and pull the Glock from the holster inside his jacket. But I did limp in front of them toward the ambulance so that the guard, still in the ambulance, wouldn’t see them, either. When I came up to the driver-side window, I did what Bo had told me and got out of the way. Above us on the road, Arch and Jake climbed into the Jeep.

  Wielding the Glock, Bo barked commands into the ambulance. I stationed myself behind the rear doors as the driver and the attendant police officer lined up by the emergency vehicle. The police officer was a woman I knew, but her name eluded me. She unlocked the ambulance doors. Marla, clad in an orange prisoner suit, emerged slowly. She hopped clumsily down onto the graveled shoulder. Her face was swollen with hives and she was gasping. Seeing me, her rasping breath turned instantly into wrenching sobs.

  Bo demanded the guard’s gun and got it. He threw it off the cliff that abutted the road. Down, down into the ravine the gun fell.

  Holding the Glock high. Bo yanked something that I guessed to be the radio wire out of the ambulance. He ordered the ambulance driver back into the disabled vehicle. Then he ordered the female guard to do something to the driver. She leaned into the cab to follow Bo’s orders.

  “Marla! How sick are you?” I demanded anxiously. “Are you breathing okay?”

  She wheezed, then said, “Well, I look a lot better than you, I can tell you that!”

  “Blood’s fake. Your epinephrine is on the passenger-side front seat of that Jeep up there. Go, take care of yourself!”

  “Is that you, Goldy? Goldy Schulz?” the female guard called from the ambulance. “Are you nuts? Don’t do this!”

  I stared down at the policewoman. I still could not, for the life of me, recall her name. To my horror, General Bo raised his gun and brought it down on her skull. Her body crumpled to the pavement.

  “Come on!” Bo yelled at me. The fake blood streaked on his face made him look ghoulish. “Bring that car down!”

  My muscles felt as if they’d turned to sponge. “I don’t believe he did that,” I muttered as I jogged to the Jeep. I threw the car into gear and checked the rear-view mirror for traffic. Beside me, Marla rasped a request to Arch that he avert his eyes so she could have privacy. Then she rolled down the waistband of the orange prisoner pants, took a shuddery breath, and stabbed herself in the hip with the Epipen. She rolled the pants back up and whispered an all-clear to Arch. My son star
ed, openmouthed, at General Bo and the unconscious policewoman. He looked confused and scared, as if what we had just done had finally penetrated his consciousness.

  I veered onto the road and brought the Jeep to where Bo stood. He bolstered his gun and assumed a paternal tone. “Please get into the back, Goldy.”

  As I hopped out of the car, a blue van traveling eastward slowly passed us and stopped on the shoulder twenty feet below the ambulance. The Front Range ambulance lights flashed inexorably: red and white, red and white. The guard’s body did not move. I couldn’t see or hear the ambulance driver.

  I opened the door to the back seat. Jake began to howl. On the shoulder twenty feet from the ambulance, two women emerged from the van. They were calling to us: Need help? Everything all right? Need … call on … cell phone? Suddenly I felt Bo’s hand grip my shoulder.

  “Get back in the goddam car, Goldy. Climb back there with your son, now!”

  Arch was crying. His body was stiff with fear. I lost my balance trying to sit and ended up both beside and partly on top of Jake. The dog snuffled and whined. I was sorry to have scared Arch. But seeing Marla so weak and frightened strengthened my resolve.

  Bo checked the mirror, then zoomed the Jeep across three lanes and careened up onto the bumpy median. The Jeep rocked from side to side as it bounced, too fast, over the rocky, unlandscaped strip dividing the interstate. Finally the car shot up on the westbound side of the highway. Bo snapped the steering wheel to straighten the shuddering car. The Jeep’s engine ground ominously as we sped back toward Aspen Meadow.

  Marla struggled to breathe. The rash on her chubby bruised face made her look monstrous. Jake snuffled and licked my hand. General Bo was staring straight ahead, pushing the Jeep to high speed.