by Joan Hess
“Lemme ask her.”
I waited an interminably long time, straining to understand the muffled exchange. I was reduced to gnawing on the pencil and spitting out bits of painted wood when the woman said, “Mervine ain’t real positive, but she thinks he was young and sickly, like he had tuberculosis. She thinks he had blond hair. She drove him all over Maggody, up and down dirt roads till she liked to overheat the engine, and finally over to a café in Hasty. She came back for him in an hour, then took him back to the airport. He gave her a nice tip, though.”
“Thanks,” I murmured.
“Glad to be of help. Next time you need a limousine, just call us and we’ll give you the best deal in town, ya hear?”
I thanked her again and replaced the receiver. So Brian Quint had come to Maggody several weeks ago. He’d cruised around town in the slinky black car for most of the day, then quietly flown back to California.
Before I could concoct any explanations for his visit, the telephone rang. I let the machine answer it, listened long enough to determine that Ruby Bee was still worried about Estelle, and dashed out to my car, where I’d cleverly left my umbrella. As I drove toward the north end of town, I remembered that I had the surveillance equipment in my trunk that I’d planned to return to Sageman. Now I’d have to sort through his papers and find a contact at his foundation to advise me about his and Brian’s effects. I may have slept through that class, too.
The rental car appeared undisturbed. I unlocked the door and searched through the clutter for a note or map that might have lured Brian to the low-water bridge. My posterior was thoroughly soaked by the time I crawled out, empty-handed and irritated.
Rain slithered under my jacket collar and streamed down the sides of my face as I opened the trunk, but what I saw was responsible for the chill that seized me. Neatly folded was a bundle of shimmery material. Next to it was a portable blowtorch with a bright red propane tank and a blackened nozzle; its label proclaimed it to be a Wonder Weeder (patent pending). A silver motorcycle helmet had rolled toward the back of the trunk. Someone had done a meticulous job painting oversize almond eyes and a round mouth.
Here I’d been searching the unfriendly skies for our alien when he’d been in the trunk all along. It was a little late to be fastidious about fingerprints, so I pushed the fabric aside and found boots that had been spray-painted to match the rest of the costume. They were of an unremarkable size and had no discernible tread. Under them was some kind of flat flashlight pack and, more ominously, a length of garden hose and roll of electric tape.
I knelt at the back of the rental car. The scratches on the tailpipe were barely visible, but the accumulation of crusty grime had been disturbed. It seemed I’d found the murder weapon. Now all I needed was to put it at the scene of the crime. Brian Quint could have driven it to the low-water bridge, but he’d been in no condition to drive it back to the Esso station.
Someone else had done that.
After some more thinking, I drove back to the PD and called Harve to tell him about the likely source of carbon monoxide. He put me on hold while he arranged for the rental car to be examined, and I was doodling on the margin of my missing persons’ list (and wishing I could add myself) when the door opened and Reggie Pellitory shuffled in.
When Harve came back on the line, I told him I’d call him later and gestured at Reggie to sit down.
“I brung the note,” he said, dropping it on my desk. “I got to be at work in an hour. Jim Bob’ll have my ass in a sling if I’m late.”
“Don’t count on getting the second fifty-dollar payment,” I said.
“It wasn’t my fault I didn’t deliver to the guy in person. That bitch at the bar grabbed it out of my hand and said she’d see to it. I deserved the rest of the money since I missed the semifinals of the tractor pull. I been waiting all year for that.”
“I’ve learned how the note got to you, Reggie, but I don’t know why. Who would expect you to cooperate?”
“How should I know?”
“Try to help me out here. Someone knew your name and where you worked, and the same someone assumed you’d do an errand for money. Who was it?”
“Like I said, how should I know?”
“Did you see that black limousine that drove all over town a few weeks ago?”
“I was over in Farberville bailing out my pa.” He shifted a wad of tobacco from one cheek to the other and glanced around for a coffee can. The previous chief of police had provided several of them, but I’d unwisely insisted on a more classy ambiance. Hence the stains on the floor.
“You related to Raz Buchanon?” I asked idly.
“Hell, no—and I’ll beat the shit out of anyone who sez otherwise.”
I decided not to offer any editorials about the Pellitory ancestry and let him leave while I nurtured a couple of novel notions. Harve would have to wait for my call until after I had a little talk with Raz. Unless I was on the wrong track (and I’d been on often enough to recognize every pothole), consanguinity wouldn’t enter into it.
Conspiracy was a whole ’nother ball of wax.
“That’s right,” Ruby Bee said, glad she wasn’t paying for the long-distance call. That man on the other end spoke so slowly that the words came out like tree sap. She reminded herself to be charitable, since he was so far south he was likely to slip off the tip of Florida, where he’d disappear forever into the Bermuda Triangle. She tried to match his tempo as she repeated, “A dinosaur ate my car.”
“What kind?”
“A Chevrolet.”
There was a moment of silence. “What kind of dinosaur?” he asked at last.
Ruby Bee racked her mind for fancy dinosaur names, but the only one she could think of was that fat purple one that sang sugary songs and was on every twin sheet at Kmart. “I was too terrified to notice,” she said, opting for the offense. “You would have been, too, if you’d gone out in your backyard and seen this monster picking his teeth with your windshield wipers.”
“I’m sure I would have. Can you describe the dinosaur for me? Color? Size? Was it alone or were there others in the yard? Did it attempt to attack you?”
Ruby Bee wished she’d chosen an easier premise, but it was too late now. “I thought maybe you’d want to send someone to interview me. I could do better if I was interviewed in person, and I wouldn’t mind a bit if the reporter wanted to take my picture. In fact, I’d be real proud.”
“The Weekly Examiner conducts its investigation by telephone, and we prefer actual artist’s depictions to photographs. Just tell me about this astonishing ordeal with as much description as you can provide. If we use the story, you’ll receive a check for fifty dollars ten days after publication.”
“You never send reporters?”
“Never.”
Ruby Bee hung up and went to the window to stare at the door of No. 4, where someone claiming to be a tabloid reporter was staying. Maybe he was the secret agent for the government, she thought as she clutched the collar of her robe more tightly. He’d tried to trick her and Estelle into helping him steal Dr. Sageman’s files. When that had failed, had he crept into his room and killed him?
More important, what had he done with Estelle?
Saralee had to wait until Aunt Joyce went to lie down before she dared make the call. Traci and the baby were in the living room watching cartoons; she didn’t know where Larry Junior was, but she hadn’t seen him for more than an hour. Uncle Larry Joe had gone off to a town council meeting, even though Aunt Joyce had pitched a fit. When he insisted, she’d thrown a plate of French toast at him and called him a yellow-bellied coward. Traci and Larry Junior both had burst into tears, and the baby had choked on a Cheerio and turned blue. All in all, breakfast had been lively at the Lambertino house.
She closed the kitchen door and dialed the toll-free number. When a woman answered, Saralee got down to business. “Bigfoot tried to break into my house last night.”
“How old are you?”
“Old enough. I was the one who saw him first. He was digging through the garbage out in the backyard. He looked right at me with these red eyes that glowed like they was on fire. I was so scared I wet my pants.”
The woman sighed. “Sorry, but we’ve got enough Bigfoot stories for the rest of the year.”
“He came in a flying saucer,” Saralee added desperately. “They must have set him down in the pasture behind the house. Everybody in town saw the lights.”
“I did half a dozen flying saucer stories last month. Now if your great-grandmother was pregnant, the Probe might be interested.”
“But I saw Bigfoot myself! He was right on the patio, trying to get inside and kill me. My uncle shot at him last night. If you was to send a reporter, I could show him where it happened and let him take my picture.” She paused, then gave it her best. “And pictures of the bloodstains. My uncle winged him and blood splattered everywhere. The dog’s still missing, and the cat’s nothing but clumps of fur and pink guts.”
“We do all our interviews from right here in the office, and we have a great big file of photographs. You have an exuberant imagination, sweetie. Give us a call after you graduate from college.”
Saralee banged down the receiver, checked to see that Traci was still staring at the television, and went to see if Larry Junior wanted to play Bigfoot Meets Barbie.
Raz was standing on his porch as I parked. From my perspective, the side yard appeared as empty as his expression—and his pockets. His cheek was a different matter, but it would take full-scale military intervention to change his repugnant habit.
“Business trickled off?” I asked him in a touching display of neighborly concern.
“Reckon so.”
“Maybe that’s why Marjorie got bored and went wandering last night.”
Something not unlike apprehension flashed across his face. He inched away from me and shook his mangy head. “I dunno what got into her. Most times she’s real content to watch old movies, but long about midnight she turned restless and snuck out. Mebbe it was on account of the moon.”
“Or maybe you went over to the Flamingo Motel to do a little business,” I said, forcing myself to bear down on him despite my inherent aversion to lice and everything about him. “Maybe you wanted to find out how to increase ticket sales by adding more circles or arranging for another explosion across the creek.” I poked him in the chest. “You didn’t know that Dr. Sageman was dead, did you? You put Marjorie in the truck and drove over to see if he had any new suggestions. When the deputy drove away and folks started prowling all over the parking lot, you thought you’d better wait to see what happened. Marjorie decided to go see for herself.” I poked him again, this time nearly hard enough to send him off the edge of the porch. “Then the deputy returned and you hightailed it back to your shack. Sure enough, Deputy Whitbread showed up a few minutes later and asked you to coax Marjorie out of the motel room.”
He held up his hands. “I don’t know nuthin’ about that, ’specially the explosion. I liked to jump out of my skin.”
“Listen up, Raz Buchanon, those crop circles didn’t simply appear one night in your field. I already know that Brian Quint came to Maggody a few weeks back. He drove all around town until he spotted the perfect site and someone who was shifty and degenerate enough to go along with his scheme. He told you how to construct the crop circles, didn’t he?”
“It may have been something like that,” Raz whined into his whiskers. “But it weren’t illegal, Arly. I never said that there was flying saucers out in the field. Iffen folks wanted to have a look for themselves, they were free to do it.” He sent an arch of tobacco juice toward the field and tried to look remorseful. “Not free, mebbe, but nobody made ’em pay.”
“How’d you make the circles?”
“I went along the other side of the fence and propped a ladder on the top strand. Then I crawled down the rungs into the field, strapped boards on my feet, and started walking in circles. That young feller told me about putting a stick in the middle and holding onto a string so’s the circles would be round. I measured the strings real careful before I started.” He hooked his thumb beneath his overall strap and puffed up like a bedraggled rooster. “I did a goddamn good job, too. Fooled you, dint I?”
“You sure did, Raz. You also fooled the tabloid reporters, the representatives from UFORIA, the woman from the television station in Farberville, and Dr. McMasterson, to name a few.”
“And that Sageman feller,” he added with a cackle. “He promised to talk about me at some conference in Texas next month. He had slides of me and Marjorie that he was gonna show, and he even said he might write about me in a book. The only book that you ever find the Buchanon name in is a family Bible, and that ain’t common.”
“Then Sageman didn’t realize the crop circles were faked?” I asked, surprised. “Why did you go to talk to him last night?”
“I went to get my money from Quint. I dint hear till this morning how the aliens murdered him out by the low-water bridge. You catch ’em yet?”
“I’m getting close,” I said, then went back to my car. His assertion that he hadn’t done anything illegal was apt to be true. Fraud was a factor, but he’d never claimed that extraterrestrials (or intraterrestrials) had made the circles. Somewhere in the Constitution is the inalienable right to make fools of ourselves by jumping on whatever bandwagon we wish. All Raz had done was charge a small fee for the privilege. It paled in comparison with what McMasterson, Sageman, and scores of others had been doing for decades.
I suppose Abraham Lincoln was right when he claimed you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Then again, he’d never come to Maggody.
FIFTEEN
Brother Verber licked the stamp and reverently placed it on the envelope. He wished he knew the zip code for the Vatican, but surely those Italian postmen would know where John Paul’s house was, him being the pope and all. He didn’t know how much postage he needed either. It’d be mighty embarrassing if his letter arrived with a few pennies due, but the Catholic Church had so much money they had boxes of it in the basement and gold fixtures in all the bathrooms (or so he’d heard from a Baptist preacher over in Berryville who’d seen a movie called Nasty Habits three times).
He made sure his return address was easy to read, then said a little prayer concerning future financial prosperity and tucked the envelope in his pocket. He’d been so busy with his letter that he’d kinda forgotten about Brother Jim Bob’s call earlier. Now he got up from the dinette and gave the matter his full and undivided attention while he poured a glass of wine and stood at the window, watching a haggard dog slink across the grass and disappear behind the Assembly Hall. According to Brother Jim Bob, Sister Barbara had done much the same, except in her car, of course.
Absently sucking a drop of wine off his lip, Brother Verber thought about her plight. Maybe having to face the possibility of destitution and disgrace had driven her away to live out her final days in desolate, tacky motel rooms without cable. Or even worse, she might become a bag lady who wheeled her pitiful possessions in a grocery cart from garbage can to garbage can, subsisting on moldy bread crusts and limp lettuce leaves. Her skin would grow wrinkled, her hair gray and scraggly, and her body so skinny that her breasts would shrivel up like empty burlap bags.
He battled back tears as he refilled his glass. She’d come to him for advice, and he’d flat out failed her. It was as much his fault as it was Brother Jim Bob’s that her breasts someday would no longer be a glorious tribute to God’s handiwork (comparable to round ripe melons such as your catawbas and honeydews).
He sat down on the sofa to pray for guidance and a little help remembering the exact details of what Sister Barbara had said about Jim Bob’s plummet into perdition. Guidance was not forthcoming, but he finally pulled together most of the conversation.
The root of evil in this case was Raz Buchanon’s still up on Cotter’s Ridge. If there wasn’t any still, there wouldn’t be any moonshi
ne. If there wasn’t any moonshine, Jim Bob wouldn’t be able to deliver it, and there wouldn’t be any revenue agents wanting to seize Sister Barbara’s cherished possessions. She’d return all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and brimming with eagerness to aid him in his war against Satan. Her honeydews would inspire them into every battle.
He’d found the still in the past. The situation had been awkward, but there wasn’t any time to dwell on it (although Sister Barbara had looked real fetching in that scarlet nightie and cute lil panties, not to forget the peekaboo bra with the tantalizing black strap straying down her satiny shoulder).
Brother Verber told himself that all he had to do to save saintly Sister Barbara was to go find the still and make sure he destroyed it once and for all. He drained the glass and rose unsteadily to his feet. He was almost to the door of the rectory when he had a less pleasant memory of the incident on the ridge when he’d rustled up a skunk with a real poor attitude. He detoured to his bedroom and collected his raincoat and boots, then put on the plastic pith helmet, just in case.
Humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” to strengthen his resolve, he marched out to his car. Like the post office, he was committed to deliver rain or shine. In his case he’d deliver eternal salvation rather than picture postcards and reminders from the rural electric cooperative.
I headed out to the north end of town to make sure Harve’s boys were photographing and fingerprinting the guilty car. As I approached the SuperSaver, however, I braked so abruptly I was nearly rear-ended by a dump truck and swerved into the parking lot.
Eula Lemoy, Elsie Buchanon, and Lottie Estes stood in a line on the sidewalk beneath the overhang. Each held a cardboard sign attached to a stick (broom, yard, and hickory, respectively). The words were written in the impeccable penmanship of a schoolteacher, and offered the same sentiment: DON’T BUY GROCERIES FROM A MOONSHINER!
I rolled down the car window. “How y’all doing?”
“Fine, thank you,” Eula said without turning her head. “How are you today?”