Biff didn’t loosen his hold on me until we were off the camp grounds. When we passed the last trailer I took out my compact and tried to do something with my face. It was useless.
“Look, darling,” I said, putting the compact back into my pocket, “I don’t mind having the natives get a preview of how I look when I wake up in the morning, but I would like to know what is the rush. That is, if I’m not being too obtrusive, as Mother would say.”
Biff didn’t even have the courtesy to look at me. With his eyes straight ahead, he replied slowly, “Career or no career, mother-in-law or no mother-in-law, murder is murder. I love your mother. You know that, but . . .”
“Skip the buildup and give me the meat of the dialogue,” I interrupted.
“Well,” Biff said after he had sulked a little, “you’ll have to admit that Evangie can be difficult at times. If Corny did know anything . . .”
“If?”
“Yeah, he probably saw Evangie with the shovel heading for the woods. But if he was sure what she was doing, I think he would have come right out and said it.”
We walked on awhile without talking. Then Biff grinned.
“It was kinda cute of her at that. All by herself dragging that putrid old body into the woods and burying it. They don’t make women like that today.”
I should have let it go at that, but not me! Oh no, I’m always in there with my big mouth wide open. I had to tell him about my great great grandmother.
“She was a part of the Donner expedition, ya know.”
Biff gave me a “really,” so I went into the story headfirst.
“Yeah. They were homesteading and they got lost in the mountains in the winter. Snow and wolves and no food. It must have been terrible. My grandmother was one of the few survivors. Grandpa used to tell me how the scouts found her. She was in a daze, of course, and her ears were frozen, but she looked so fat and healthy they couldn’t figure the thing out. By all rights she shoulda been damn near starved to death, lost for over a month like that. But not my great great grandmother! When they got her home and undressed her, what do you think they found?”
“I dunno,” Biff said disinterestedly.
“Steaks, all strapped around her body. Human steaks.”
I kept on walking but I peeked at Biff from the corner of my eye. He was still staring straight ahead, so I gave him the blackout. “They recognized one piece of the meat as my great great uncle Louie. They could tell by the tattoo on his hip. It was a picture of the rock of ages. I was named after him; you know, Louie, Louise.”
There was more to the story, but Biff made a dive for the bushes. I waited for him. I thought it was the wifely thing to do. When he came out, he was white around the eyes, so I didn’t tell him about my great great grandfather. I suddenly realized I’d better give Biff the family history character by character.
We walked the next half mile silently. Then Biff’s complexion cleared a little. “Real pioneer stock,” he said. “Yep, that accounts for it.”
6WE FOUND THE SHERIFF IN HIS OFFICE. HE WAS relaxed in a swivel chair, with his feet, in their high-heeled boots, propped up on the roll-top desk. He put down a copy of Variety when Biff and I walked in. Then he stood up to greet us.
“Well, well, I didn’t expect to see you so soon,” he said jovially. He drew out a chair for me and one for Biff. Then he pulled out a bottle from a drawer in his desk. He poured three drinks into paper cups and placed them in front of us.
“First of all,” he said, “we get sociable.”
Biff gulped his drink.
I nursed mine.
“Come on, drink up,” the sheriff said. “You two look like a couple of beat coyotes. Nothing serious enough for such long faces.”
“I’m afraid this is,” Biff said.
“If it’s about the fire, I was fixing to ask you a few questions,” the sheriff said. “Matter of fact, I was going to question you this morning. Then, when I saw that you really were a bunch of actors, I didn’t bother.”
Biff sat on the edge of his chair. His expression was the same as when H. I. Moss would ask him to take a salary cut. Biff always knew he’d agree to the terms, but he liked to be coaxed.
I knew he was going to tell everything, but he wanted to wait for the right moment.
He didn’t have to wait long. The sheriff must have gone to the same school of acting. His timing was beautiful.
“Yep,” he said. “Soon’s I knew you were actors I knew you wouldn’t be mixed up in anything like that.”
“Like what?” Biff asked cautiously.
“Why, that body we found in the woods during the fire,” the sheriff replied, as though we should know all about it. “Shot through the head. Body was in bad shape, too. Dead for a spell, all right.”
I drank my drink on that.
“Yep. Looked like someone poured gasoline on it and then touched it with a match. We’ll be able to identify it, but . . .”
“Mother wouldn’t do that!” I said.
The sheriff and Biff stared at me. The sheriff in surprise, Biff in annoyance.
“Will you let me tell it, Punkin?” he asked. “You get too involved. And not only that, you keep pulling the blackout too quick. This is the way it happened,” Biff said to the sheriff. “Last week we got married. We bought the trailer for our honeymoon. First we send for Evangie so she can go along for the ride. Then we start running into these friends of ours. They’re all going east, and so are we. Plenty of room. So we ask ’em . . .”
“You ask ’em, you mean,” I said, just in case the sheriff got the wrong idea.
“All right then. I ask them. Anyway, there we are: dogs, monkey, guinea pig, friends, mother-in-law . . .”
“And,” I interrupted again, “you might give my mother top billing.”
“Bill, our doggie, has developed an annoying habit of dragging presents into the trailer for us,” Biff said, ignoring me completely. “One day it’s a fish head, next day it’s a bone, then it’s something we can’t name. Anyway, these things have a rare smell to ’em. Evangie’s asthma powder has got a rare smell. Between the mixture, we don’t notice this other smell until we get in Ysleta yesterday. Then the three of us start looking. We naturally think Bill has come up with a prize, but what we don’t expect is what we find.
“Evangie sees it when she opens up the bed in the back room. There’s a tin bathtub under it. We don’t use the tub because we always stop in tourist camps and they have showers. You have to carry a lot of water for that tub business, and it makes the trailer side heavy. So, we haven’t looked under that bed since we left San Diego. Anyway, Evangie lets the bed fall down and then she locks the doors before she tells us what’s in the tub. I take a look, and sure enough!”
“There it is,” I said.
“The damnedest, deadest body you ever saw.”
The sheriff pinched his chin with a large hand. He looked at Biff from under his bushy eyebrows. “A body, eh?”
“Yep,” Biff said. “When I go to lift it out of the tub, a hunk of the face fell off.”
That’s when I spilled my drink. Biff had promised me he would never mention that again. While I told him what I thought of him for going into all the sordid details when he knew very well how sick it made me, the sheriff began talking to himself.
“That fits, all right,” he said.
Biff had brought my great great grandmother into the argument, so I didn’t get the sheriff’s question until he repeated it.
“Did you recognize the body?”
“Oh, sure,” Biff said. “He was our best man.”
The sheriff thought that meant that we had known him all our lives, so we had to go through the whole story of our water-taxi wedding; how we found the best man in a saloon, how we picked up the captain in another saloon, where we got the boat, and everything.
“Never saw him before, eh?”
“Never,” Biff said. “Never saw him after, either. That is, until I lifted up the bed and l
ooked in the bathtub.”
“Except that time in San Diego,” I said firmly.
Biff shook his head. “Gyp swears she saw the guy in San Diego, but the guy we saw didn’t even speak to us. If it’d been George, why he’d have fallen all over us. He was a very pleasant guy.”
“George who?” the sheriff asked.
Biff and I looked at each other. That was the first time I had thought about our best man having a last name.
“We didn’t ask him,” Biff said. “Funny, now that I think it over. You’d think he woulda told us.”
“Yes,” the sheriff said. “Or that you would have asked him. Now, what about those other actors traveling with you? Any of them recognize the body?”
“Oh, we didn’t let them know what we were trouping around with us,” Biff said quickly. “Those two dames would have gone off their nut. Then, too, we thought we should tell the cops first.”
“So you waited a day to do that,” the sheriff said. “In the meantime someone steals the corpse, carries it out to the woods, pours gasoline on it, and sets it afire . . .”
I knew what was going through Biff’s head. It was going through mine, too. The solution sounded good. We hadn’t said it. The sheriff said it. If he wanted to reconstruct the scene to please himself, why should we break it up?
“No,” Biff said slowly. “Gyp’s mother, Evangie, that is . . .”
“Mother set fire to the wood.” I said it quickly, before I could change my mind. “Mother did it so she could bury the body. She wouldn’t have poured gasoline on it, though. Mother wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
The sheriff raised an eyebrow. Then he scratched his chin again.
“If anybody but an actor told me a story like that, I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Even with actors, I find it hard to swallow. For instance, why should your mother go to all that bother burying a body when none of you knew the corpse? Why not go right to the police and tell the story? Then another thing. How could you stand the smell of a body decaying right under your bed? Why didn’t you ask those four friends of yours about it? And why didn’t you tell me about it this morning when I was out there? How could a woman carry a body like that? What kind of a woman could lift it, let alone carry it almost five hundred feet?”
“She put it in a wagon,” I said. “You didn’t expect her to carry it over your shoulder, did you?” I didn’t realize I had used Mother’s exact words until they were out of my mouth. “It was a neighbor’s wagon,” I added lamely.
“And the reason she didn’t want to tell the police was because she didn’t want Gyp to have all that bad publicity,” Biff said. “Evangie’s got a strange way of justifying things. She figured that as long as we didn’t kill the guy, why should we go through the mess of being suspected maybe. Hell’s bells, the guy was dead. There was nothing we could do about that. Then why tell the bunch that’s traveling with us? Telling them would be like broadcasting it over a national hookup. I’ll be damned if I can explain why we didn’t get wise to the odor, though. It may be because the bathtub adjoins the icebox. There’s only one drain, ya see. Maybe the ice kept the body chilled.”
“In other words,” the sheriff said, “you condone this act of your mother-in-law’s?”
“Not exactly,” Biff replied. “But she is my mother–in-law. I gotta stick by her, don’t I? And she really was doing it for Punkin and me.”
The sheriff got to his feet slowly. He reached over and took his hat from an antler hanging on the wall. “Think you could find the burial place?” he asked me.
“I know the general direction,” I said.
The sheriff looked at Biff and me for a moment. Then he threw open the door. The bright sunlight blinded me. Then I saw the Model T parked in front of us.
The sheriff climbed into the front seat. “Well, come on,” he said. “Let’s go take a look at where your mother buried that body of hers.”
Biff climbed into the front seat with the sheriff. I sat in the back. The sheriff, I decided, was certainly not squandering the taxpayers’ money. I have traveled in broken-down crates before, but the sheriff’s car was a new experience in discomfort. It was no time to beef, though, so I kept my ideas to myself.
Instead of driving through the trailer camp, he took a longer route around the back. It brought us out near Mrs. Smith’s burned trailer. The sheriff parked the car, and we got out to walk from there.
The dry grass underfoot was dusty and hot. It burned right through my thin-soled sandals. The same heavy smell of chemicals and gasoline filled the air. The trailer looked sad, I thought. Twisted metal supports were mixed up with the remains of a permanent-wave machine. The base of a hair drier was still intact. Otherwise it was a total loss.
“They won’t be able to salvage much of that,” I said. I thought I had been talking to Biff, but when I turned around he had disappeared. I called his name, and he answered from the burned wreckage.
“I was just casing the joint,” he said as he caught up with me. “You never know what women suffer for their kissers until you take a look at those contraptions. Can you imagine a guy going through all that to get a good looking?”
“In some cases,” I said “it might help a little.”
The sheriff walked on ahead, so we followed him. The ground was hot. Not from the sun now but from the fire. Here the grass was charred and still smoking in places. The small tree stumps had been uprooted by the firemen and they looked like wires reaching up through the black dirt.
Ahead, I saw the disturbed grave. The shallow hole was empty.
“Looks like a woman’s idea of a deep hole,” the sheriff said. He kicked aside a few leaves that were under his foot.
Biff stood near him and peered into the hole. They both reached for the white square of linen at the same time.
The sheriff was quicker. He held a handkerchief in his hands. It was a plain white handkerchief, the kind you buy in drugstores for a dime. He shoved it into his pocket before I could see if it was large or small, before I could see if it had a laundry mark on it. Not that I know one laundry mark from another, but I was anxious to know about the handkerchiefs found in the grave. It was clean. I had an idea it had been dropped there since the fire. Mother’s handkerchiefs were gaily colored. They were very small.
Biff was looking farther into the woods. He squinted his eyes.
“Look!” he said.
The sheriff and I looked. A six-by-two mound is unmistakable. The dirt that formed the mound was fresh. Even from a distance of several feet. I could see that it was damp.
I followed Biff and the sheriff as they ran toward the mound. When they began kicking away dirt, I closed my eyes tightly. I knew what they were going to find and I couldn’t look at another corpse again as long as I lived.
They worked quietly for a minute. Then I heard the sheriff say, “Easy now. I think this is it.”
Biff grunted in agreement.
My eyes were pressed together so tightly that I saw green lights, then red lights dancing before me. I put my hands to my eyes and pushed the thumbs tightly against the center of my nose.
Biff said, “Well, I’ll be double damned!” He waited a moment. Then, “This ain’t our corpse at all!”
“Naturally,” the sheriff said calmly. “Yours is at the morgue.”
I opened my eyes and saw Biff holding the coat of a very dead man. Slumped way down in the coat I saw the bulge of the body. The sun was filtering through the stunted trees, and I thought something glittered. I looked more closely and saw the handle of a butcher knife. It was sticking out of the man’s back. Just an ordinary butcher knife, and most of it was buried in the ruddy material of the coat.
Biff let the body fall back into the overturned grave, and the dead man’s face stared up at me. What was left of a face, I should say.
“Someone must have smashed it in,” I heard Biff say hoarsely.
“Wish you hadn’t been so quick in handling it,” the sheriff said. He knelt down
and examined the clothes of the dead man. The lining of the coat was torn, the pockets were turned inside out.
“Stripped clean,” the sheriff said.
I looked at him. Stripped was a funny word for him to use, I thought. Then I suddenly knew what he meant.
“Someone did that so you couldn’t identify him?”
The sheriff didn’t answer me. “Call Doc Gonzales,” he said. “That’s the number I gave you this morning. Tell the doc to get over here right away. And tell him to pick up a couple of the boys. Biff and I’ll wait here.”
I vaguely remember running through the woods and toward the camp office. I felt the scrap of paper in my slacks pocket. My hands were wet and sticky. The paper seemed to be soggy, too. In a moment I was in the office. A second later I hear the doctor’s voice over the telephone.
“Hurry!” I said to him, as though that mattered. “Murdered. Yes, back of the trailer camp . . .” I hung up and braced myself against the wall.
Then I saw Gee Gee. Her face was white and drawn.
“Did they find him?” she asked.
“Biff and the sheriff . . .” I stammered. “We were out in the woods . . .”
“They took it out of the bathtub?” Gee Gee asked. Little beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. Her red hair was wet where it fell over her neck and shoulders. Her mouth was quivering.
I grabbed her by the arm and began shaking her. “Stop it,” I said. “Stop it!”
Suddenly she relaxed.
“How did you know about it?” I asked.
“I – saw it, Gyp,” she said. “I saw it in the bathtub yesterday. Oh, Gyppy, what’ll I do?” She started crying softly. Her mouth began quivering again. “What’ll I do?”
7IT WASN’T IN THE BATHTUB, IT WAS IN THE WOODS,” I said. “And besides, there are two of ’em already. There may be more, for all I know. I do know this new one is a very unpretty thing. Aside from having his face smashed in, someone was being awfully cute when they tore out the tailor label from his coat. They took everything out of the pockets too.”
Mother Finds a Body Page 5