Val & Pals Boxed Set: Volumes 1,2 & the Prequel (Val & Pals Humorous Mystery Series)

by Margaret Lashley

  “Cool your jets, Winky,” said Goober, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I thought we could use the can to collect the donations in. Decorate it up nice. Put it by the cash register. Maybe glue a picture of Glad on it. We gotta to do something quick, you know. We gotta to pay the piper, sore to speak.”

  Sore to speak. Shit. As a professional writer, I’d come to realize that being highly literate was definitely overrated. When applied too liberally, it could be the ruination of your life.

  “I’ll take care of it,” I heard myself say. From the look of it, I was probably the only one among us with more than twenty bucks to my name. Relatively speaking, I wasn’t that short of cash at the moment. But I had been short on friendship. Glad had filled that hole for me for an amazing six weeks. I was grateful, and if she really was still hanging around, I wanted to let her know it. “I’ll have a nice donation container here in an hour. You can count on me.”

  “That would be really great,” said Jorge. He batted back tears from his big, blackish-brown eyes and stared at my feet again.

  “Okie dokie, then,” I said, involuntarily mimicking Glad like people do when they spend a lot of time together. I flushed with embarrassment at my faux pas and scanned the guys’ faces. They registered nothing but sad, wistful smiles. Relieved, I nodded and turned toward the parking lot. At my car, I slipped my shorts on over my bathing suit and inched my feet back into my flip-flops. To save time, I left Maggie’s convertible top down and headed to the nearest Target store.

  ***

  The comforting nearness of Glad and her whispered inside jokes dissipated in the steamy heat during the drive to the store. In their wake my heart grew numb and hollow with shock. Walking into the fluorescent-lit retail extravaganza was an assault on my overwrought senses. Everything was hideously bright, garish and pointless. A cacophony of silent callousness, carelessness and cruelty. I rummaged half-heartedly, then angrily through the ludicrously large selection of storage containers and kitchen canisters. Nothing seemed right.

  Who makes all this shit, anyway?

  I was about to panic when an idea struck me. I padded over to the children’s section in search of a piggybank. I found a white ceramic one about a foot tall, complete with pink wings and a halo. The chubby cherub’s huge, hound-dog eyes looked up sweetly at the inscription, “For My Little Angel.” It was perfect. Perfectly freaking awful. I wanted to smash it to bits with a freaking pink hammer. But it was either that insipid angel or a Dalmatian-spotted cow that mooed and wagged its tail every time someone shoved a coin down its throat.

  I was carrying the blasted angel thing up to the register when I felt something make contact with the top of my head. In Florida, that usually meant a bug had landed on you, and by bug I mean anything from a common housefly to an armored cockroach the size of a half-eaten Mars bar. I instinctively ducked my head down and swatted at my hair. Nothing.

  Probably just my imagination. I really could be going crazy. How would I know?

  I planned to contemplate the idea further but got distracted. From my bent-over vantage point I caught sight of something sitting at the register endcap that made me grin like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I shoved the sappy angel bank back onto a shelf between bags of charcoal briquettes and tubes of sunscreen. I grabbed my prize and was back at Caddy’s in under an hour, as promised.

  “What on Earth ever made you pick that thing?” asked Goober.

  He frowned at me as I sat the foot-and-a-half tall Mr. Peanut piggybank down by the cash register next to a picture of Glad. I stepped back and compared Mr. Peanut with Goober. Twins if I ever saw a set – except for the winking holographic monocle on the plastic peanut head. The fact that Goober didn’t make the connection raised the irony factor to damn near orgasmic for me. I could have sworn I heard Glad snickering in my ear.

  Chapter Six

  Glad had lived in a universe where last names didn’t matter. Come to think of it, neither had first ones. In her world, everyone had been free to make themselves up as they went along. It seemed to me that the practice had worked pretty well for her in life. Death, however, was proving to be another story.

  The trouble was, no one knew Glad’s last name or where she lived. As weatherworn as she looked, she could have called that pink beach lounger home for all I knew. She’d had no ID on her when she died. A Jane Doe. That meant there was no known next of kin to notify of her death. Legally, I didn’t have any right to her remains. But there was just no way that I was going to let Glad’s body go unclaimed and forgotten. A corpse for the medical university or a body farm? No! Not for my precious friend Glad.

  At a loss as to what to do next, I’d arranged to meet Goober, Winky and Jorge to discuss our options for springing Glad out of the morgue. I was supposed to meet them at a restaurant called Water Loo’s in St. Pete Beach. When I walked in the dive I knew instantly that the universe was having another laugh on me. And, truth be told, I hoped it pissed its own pants.

  Even in its heyday, Water Loo’s couldn’t have hoped to be as respectable as, say, an inner-city Waffle House. The cockroach-hued, fake-wood paneling that covered every wall came in handy as camouflage for both filth and free-ranging cephalopods. The dirty linoleum floor bore a sad, worn-out trail to a row of dark-brown vinyl booths teetering on the edge of dilapidation. I would have fled if I’d had any place else to go.

  “Hey Val!” shouted a voice from the corner booth. I recognized the Marlboro-inspired baritone. It belonged to Goober. I shot a glance in that direction. The sight of the three men from Caddy’s sitting together in a booth caused me to suck in a short breath. I took a fumbling step in their direction like a tattered moth flittering headlong into a bug zapper.

  Goober and his pals looked as if they’d just washed ashore from some catastrophic and idiotic sea voyage. Sunburned faces. Stubble beards. Tattered clothes pungent with the smell of booze and sweat. They were the kind of guys whose mere presence caused eyes to shift and minds to narrow. I had to admit, the first time I’d met them I had been no exception. But their redeeming desire to help Glad had softened my feelings toward them to something undefinable. Something between unease and resignation.

  I sat down next to Goober and immediately went into shock. Glad’s unexpected departure had shoved me right into my own personal episode of The Twilight Zone – where the gods had snuck up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, and as I turned around, they’d erased every landmark and touchstone I’d ever known. They snickered evilly as I looked around in horror, like a survivor in a war zone, having been left nothing…not one person or place or thing I could turn to. What a bunch of assholes!

  “Off in Lady Lala Land?” Goober asked. He poked me to attention with a coffee spoon, then returned the dull silver utensil to his mouth. He sucked on it like a lollipop, clicking it against his teeth as he grinned at me through a bushy, brown moustache he probably lifted from an unsuspecting walrus. It didn’t suit his bald, bean-shaped head. Every time I looked at him I couldn’t help but think of that Mr. Peanut piggybank.

  “What? Oh. Umm…just thinking,” I fumbled, giving myself a second to come up with a lie. “I was just thinking…about how we all met.” I flicked my curly brown hair off my shoulder and glanced at the spot on my arm where his spoon had made contact. I contained my disgust to discreet tightening of my jaw and looked back up at Peanut Head.

  “Yeah, that was one hell of a day,” he said, nodding slowly. He flung a sideways glance across the booth in the direction of his buddies.

  “One hell of a day,” Wally and Jorge echoed in unison, then sighed like lovelorn losers. Though the two acted as a pair, they were actually as opposite as bookends. Wally was a fat, loud-mouthed, short-tempered, uber-freckled redneck. Jorge was a deep, dark mystery of quiet contemplation inhabiting the form of a lean, caramel-skinned Hispanic.

  The idea of associating with these remnants of men caused a marble-sized knot of panic to lodge just below my larynx. Light years from familiar
territory, I imagined myself a kind of urban Jane Goodall studying a tragic subspecies of homo erectus. Homo rejectus, perhaps? But like a good anthropologist, I swallowed hard and got the marble down. After all, truth be told, I really didn’t have any place else to go or anything better to do.

  “We need a gaul-dang toast!” bellowed pig-bellied Wally, jerking up from his slump like he’d been stuck with a pin. I had to commend him. Wally was actually wearing a shirt today. No sleeves and a hole where his left nipple peeked out, but a bona fide shirt nonetheless.

  “Jes. A toast,” echoed thin, sad-faced Jorge, his eyes brightening at the prospect. Judging from the bulge in the pocket of his faded Hawaiian shirt, Jorge had brought along an amigo from the liquor store this morning. Pocket rocket. Oh boy.

  The men raised their scuffed brown coffee mugs in their right hands, then placed their left hands over their hearts. It appeared to be some well-worn ritual with them. Still numb with shock, I followed their lead. When everyone was in position, Jorge made two sharp clicks out of the side of his mouth. Apparently, that was the signal for us to raise our mugs toward the center of the table until they all clunked together.

  “Screw you, Kiddo!” the men belted out over the dull clinking of plastic on plastic.

  I blinked back a bittersweet blush of memories as I watched the men take solemn, misty-eyed glances at each other like soldiers of some distant, yet never-to-be-forgotten war. I was familiar with the skirmish. Survival of the fittest. I was becoming a veteran of it myself. The sudden realization of my close camaraderie with them curdled my stomach and made me glance around the diner self-consciously. The dump was empty except for us, so I knew the dirty looks from the waitress in her ugly brown uniform were for our benefit alone.

  Mornings spent gulping down complementary Water Loo’s coffee refills looked to be the high point of the day for these guys. I hoped I wouldn’t suffer the same fate. With the toast to dearly departed Glad over, all three collapsed back into the booth like sacks of unwashed potatoes. They appeared to lose themselves in the thoughts that plague people with too much time on their hands. Booze? Sex? Regrets?

  As for me, I let my unemployed writer’s mind sink to a new low, just like my ass in that dilapidated booth. I amused myself by giving the guys a secret pet name – the three Stooges. After all, they really were stooges. And there really were three of them. Hell, one of them was even named Stu. I knew it was an easy joke. But hell. Sometimes fish in a barrel needed shooting.

  “So what are we going to do about Glad?” I tossed the question out to no one in particular.

  Goober looked up from his coffee cup. “Oh. We already held that meeting.”

  “Really? So what’s the plan?”

  “We all voted that you should take care of it,” said Goober. Then he smashed a cockroach on the table with his bare hand.

  Chapter Seven

  In Florida, people died in droves from the heat, old age, exhaustion and suicide. Bodies stacked up like cordwood in summer, and cold storage was prime real estate. I was hoping to put these facts to my advantage when I called the county morgue. At our Water Loo’s summit, the Stooges and I had agreed it would seem less creepy if a woman tried to claim Glad’s body. So I thought up a cover story and made the call.

  “Hello, I’m calling about the woman brought in yesterday,” I said, not knowing where to begin a conversation like this.

  “Which one?” asked a man’s deep, raspy voice.

  “An older lady. Silver-white, short hair?”

  “Lady, you just described half of Pinellas County.”

  “Oh. Ummm…”

  “You got a name, by chance?” he asked impatiently.

  “Yes. Glad…uhh…Gladys.”

  The line was silent for five seconds. “You really gonna make me ask for the last name?”

  “Oh! Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t know her la…I mean…she came in as a Jane Doe. I’m her niece.” Shit! I almost blew it!

  “Okay, that narrows it down to six, maybe ten I got at the moment. Any identifying marks? Scars? Tattoos?” he asked wearily.

  “I don’t think so. Oh. Wait. She’s wearing a green bathing suit. Does that help?”

  “Aww, yeah. Tanned like a leather wallet? I know the one,” said Mr. Sensitivity.

  “What do I have to do to claim her body?”

  “Come in and fill out a form.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  I jumped in the Sprint and hit the gas. I was at the county morgue before the phone got cold.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” a man asked when I walked in the door.

  I recognized the voice. The guy on the phone was the clerk on duty. It made sense.

  “Hi. I think I was just talking to you about Gladys?”

  “Hmmm?” he asked, scratching his ear. He was younger than he’d sounded on the phone, and his eyes were the same piercing, ice-water blue that Glad’s had been.

  “Green bathing suit?” I prompted.

  “Oh yeah. Crocodile hide!” The man’s goatee and grin made him look devilish, but in all the right ways.

  I nodded and did my best to smile.

  “I just got off the phone with you, right?”

  “Right. I’m Gladys’s niece. I’m here to make arrangements for her remains.”

  “You got a picture ID for her? Driver’s license?”

  Crap! I faked going through the motions of searching my purse for them. “Oh no! I must have left them at home!”

  The devilishly cute guy eyed me, his face emotionless except for a slight uptick of the eyebrows. “Is this going to be delivery or to go?”

  “What?”

  “What do you plan to do with the body?” he asked, tapping a finger on the counter.

  “Oh. I want her sent to Grabb’s Funeral Home. For cremation,” I said.

  That seemed to satisfy something in him. He gave a quick nod, grabbed a form from a pile and handed it to me. “I’m going to need to see your driver’s license.”

  I handed it over.

  “Okay,” he said. “Look, I’ll do you a favor, since you’re sending her to Grabb’s. Just fill out the form with her vitals as best you can remember them. Just make sure your contact information is accurate. That way, if anybody comes asking questions, we’ll have you on file. I’m going to need to make a copy of your license.”

  I nodded. He photocopied my license along with the form. “Sorry about your loss,” he said as he slid my license back across the counter.

  “Thanks.”

  “No, really. Sorry about the morbid humor. It’s just that this job is incredibly desensitizing. You wouldn’t believe how many people never get picked up. I’m glad your aunt isn’t going off to unclaimed freight.” He slapped himself on the forehead. “Oops! Sorry again.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “My Aunt Glad always told me there is no situation you can’t find the humor in if you look hard enough. I think she would have found your comments a real hoot.”

  The thought of Glad cackling out a laugh made me feel better. I picked up my driver’s license and my copy of the form. I had substituted my own last name for Glad’s unknown one. Gladys Fremden, born the day she died. That was one irony I didn’t stop to savor.

  ***

  The mortician at Grabb’s was more than happy to take Glad and the money required for her cremation. I was grateful and relieved he did. I gave him Glad’s case number assigned by the morgue and he said he would take care of everything. He tried to guilt me into buying a fancy coffin, but I told him basically he couldn’t get caviar from a can of pinto beans. He sniffed and informed me she’d be ready for pick-up at the end of the week. I gave him my cell number and made an appointment for Friday morning.

  I drove back to my apartment and crept inside. Even though Glad had never visited me there, the place I called home seemed emptier somehow. I cracked open a Fosters I’d picked up on the way home and toasted my dearly departed friend. “Screw you, Kiddo,”
I said, then stared at the cellphone image of Glad in her lounger, shooting me her red-lipped, clown-faced smile. It was the only picture I had of her. When this picture is gone, will there be anything left of her at all? “Screw me,” I whispered. Then I just let go of trying to be brave and strong. I broke down and let the pain wash over me, warm and wet and aching to my bones.

  ***

  Without my drinking buddy and confidant, I tried to return to my solo act. But in the wake of so much laughter, quiet contemplation had lost a great deal of its appeal. In fact, the next four days drifted along as empty and aimless as a paper bag on a windy desert street. Once or twice I thought about going to Sunset Beach, but I just couldn’t muster up the courage. One eternity and half a gallon of gin later, I woke up on the couch to discover it was Friday. Finally.

  I got myself presentable and drove to Caddy’s to get the donations from the Mr. Peanut container. The breakfast crowd was thin, so I took the opportunity to pull the bottom stopper out of Mr. Peanut and shake out his innards on the counter by the cash register. Norma, the tough, mannish lead waitress, helped me count out the dollar bills and change. Since Monday, the good people of Caddy’s had stuffed $547.36 into Mr. Peanut for Glad’s cremation/memorial fund.

  “Let me make that right for you,” Norma said matter-of-factly. I think she was afraid she’d break down if she said more. She opened the register and counted out $550.00 in twenties and a ten. She handed them to me and said, “Thanks. You’re a good egg.” She shot me a quick, tight-lipped smile and walked determinedly to the ladies room.

  I tucked the money in my purse and walked back to my car feeling as used up and unwanted as an empty tequila bottle. To keep my mind off Glad, I did mortician math. The bill for cremation in a cardboard container had come to $635.00. I was prepared to pony up the rest… eighty-five bucks. Ouch! Still, I felt more honored than burdened to cover the shortage, even though my bank account was shriveling faster than a spider on a hot stove. I pulled out of Caddy’s and drove through thick clouds of sunbaked memories all the way to Grabb’s Funeral Home.