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

by Margaret Lashley

  ***

  I don’t know why beige and chocolate brown seemed to be the favorite color pallette of funeral homes. Grabb’s was no exception. I walked inside the unremarkable building and into an even less remarkable lobby. I was greeted by beige walls, a fake potted palm and a woman at a dark brown desk wearing a cream-colored dress. Maybe proprietors thought any use of color would set grieving people off. I guess nobody ever went ballistic over beige.

  “I’m here to pick up Gladys Fremden’s cremains,” I explained to the lady.

  “Cash or credit?” she asked, glancing up from her computer screen.

  The answer “cash” made her smile. Once the bills had traded hands, she disappeared behind a darker beige door. A minute later, the mortician, a thin, bald man dressed in a dark brown suit, appeared and shook my hand with the cold, five-fingered fish at the end of his arm.

  “Into what would you like to put the cremains?” he asked. “We have a biodegradable Ocean Scatter Tube for the value price of just $135.00.”

  A hundred and thirty five bucks for a cardboard toilet-roll tube? Unbelievable! I didn’t have the time or energy to argue. So I just said, “I’ve got my own container,” and made a quick run back to my car. Mr. Peanut to the rescue once again.

  I handed the piggybank to the mortician guy. To his credit, he didn’t even blink. He took Mr. Peanut through the dark-beige door and returned a few minutes later. He handed me a noticeably heavier Mr. Peanut and dismissed me with a simple, “Good day to you.”

  When I stepped outside the funeral home with Glad in my arms, I felt weirdly giddy, like she and I had just pulled off a robbery and were making a clean getaway together. I looked at the container and grinned. I knew Glad wouldn’t mind taking a ride in Mr. Peanut. But I thought that maybe Winky, Goober and Jorge would. So I put the piggybank and his stomach full of Glad on the seat next to me and took off in search of a drugstore to buy a nice, gold-foiled gift box. After all, I could say Glad was like a gift. As good as gold. I knew it was corny. But lots of simple folks liked corny. And, ironically, most rednecks didn’t even get corny.

  I spotted a drugstore on the corner of Gulf Boulevard and 107th and was in and out with the box in my hand in under five minutes. Even so, with the top down, I’d given the July sun plenty of time to turn the Sprint’s red pleather seats into molten lava. I was wearing a sundress, and as I slid into the bucket seat I felt my thighs start to sizzle.

  “Yow!” I was busy adding a few choice, four-letter words to my conversation with the car seat when something stopped me mid-curse. I realized the seat next to me was empty. Mr. Peanut was gone! I searched the floorboards. Nothing. I scrambled over the backseat for a look. Empty. Shit! Some asshole has heisted Glad’s cremains! Her memorial was in less than an hour and I had gone and lost Glad’s final freaking remains!

  “Damn it!” I screamed into the parking lot.

  A fat woman stuffed into a pink polyester shirt and shorts walked by looking like a bipedal pig with a wig. She stared at me as if she’d just smelled a rat’s ass.

  “Maybe she did. Maybe she likes rat asses.”

  That voice inside my head was back. Was it Glad…or was it my lonely heart saying what I thought she would say? As I debated with myself, pig-woman hoisted her fat butt into a white minivan. She backed out of her parking space and shot me that look again.

  “Maybe she’s got a van full of rat asses. Sells ’em on eBay.”

  I wanted to snicker but I was in a bit of a jam. Okay, whoever you are, shut up! I don’t have time for this! Think of something, Val!

  I was about to panic when an idea hit me like a squirt of warm bird shit. I peeled out of the parking lot and made a beeline for the public parking lot at St. Pete Beach. I lurched Maggie into a space and cut the ignition. I grabbed the gold box, snatched a colander I use for sorting shells out of the trunk, and sprinted toward the barbeque grills. There were five grills in total, each about the size of a briefcase and soldered onto thick metal pipes about three feet tall. They were ugly but indestructible, and marred the beauty of public parks throughout Florida.

  After sieving through the ashes from four grills, I’d scraped together about two cups of whitish-grey powder. I had no idea how much cremains I should have, but the amount seemed kind of skimpy to me. The fifth grill was in use. A guy dressed in nothing but a blue banana hammock and ball cap was grilling chicken wings. What the hell. I decided to give it a try.

  “Hey, you got any ashes I can have? I use them to grow tomatoes.”

  “Nope, sorry,” he answered, flipping over some wings that looked as if they were on the verge of becoming cremains themselves.

  “Thanks anyway.” I turned and walked back to the car. I was about to crank the ignition when wing dude came running toward me. Not a pretty sight.

  “Hey lady, wait! I forgot!” he said, out of breath from a twenty-yard sprint. “I still have the bag of ashes I dumped when I cleaned the grill before I used it.” He tossed me a beige plastic grocery bag with what looked to be about another two cups of ashes inside. Score!

  “Thanks a bunch!”

  “No problem. Hope your tomatoes do good.”

  “Yeah. Thanks again. Enjoy your wings!”

  I dumped the ashes in the gold box and clapped on the lid, then glanced at my cellphone. Shit! The service was supposed to start in 15 minutes. I peeled out, dual glass packs rumbling as I headed south on Gulf Boulevard toward Sunset Beach.

  ***

  The parking lot at Caddy’s was crammed, but the attendant knew I was coming and had left a space open for me. I was surprised at how many people were there for the memorial. Probably a good hundred. I handed the gold box of cremains off to Goober, who looked mighty relieved to see me.

  “That was cutting it close, Val,” he said. He nervously smoothed his moustache down with his thumb and index finger. Goober had dressed for the occasion in the uniform of a burnout – a wife-beater t-shirt and impossibly baggy grey shorts that hung low on his waist and covered his knees.

  “You have no idea.”

  “I was beginin’ to thank you run off with the money, Val,” Winky said sarcastically. He shoved me on the shoulder and shot me a dirty look.

  “Sorry to shake your confidence in me, Winky. I ran into some technical difficulties.” I was contemplating getting peeved when Jorge interrupted.

  “Val! Good to see you!” The poor Latin man looked even more relieved to see me than Goober. “I was getting worried. I don’t want to lose another friend.”

  Jorge smiled shyly and offered me his arm. Besides handshakes and haircuts, I hadn’t been touched by a male human being in the better part of a year. Taking Jorge’s arm felt weird, but a good kind of weird. It made me feel lighter somehow. We walked arm-in-arm down to the beach and joined the crowd. It was a few minutes before 5 p.m. and at least half the people there already had a good buzz going. Jorge offered me a slug from his pocket flask, but it was whiskey. I didn’t do whiskey. One of my low-life standards.

  The air cracked with the sound of someone tapping on a microphone. In the silence afterward, a familiar voice said, “Okay, ever-body, listen up.”

  Winky. He was going to lead the eulogy. I settled in. This ought to be good.

  “I wrote a pome ’bout Miss Glad,” Winky continued. He cleared his throat, then spoke slowly, with a scholarly hillbilly affectation. “I call it, I Miss Glad. It goes like this:

  Glad was my friend. A friend to the end.

  She loved us all. And she was purty tall.

  I ain’t that tall but she never complained.

  She never complained ’bout a gaul-dang thang.

  A lady to the end, Glad made us all feel dear.

  Always there to lend an ear – and a good cold beer!

  They’s a word for Glad. And that word is Glad.

  I was glad to know her. Y’all can yell now, if you wanner.”

  And with that, Winky yelled the most countrified, “Woo hoo!” I’d ever heard
, and I’ve heard plenty. We did our best to follow his lead, and bayed pathetically in the hot breeze like a pack of wormy hound dogs.

  “Please now turn your attention to the water,” Winky’s voice cracked over the mic again like a carnival barker. The crowd grew silent. “Goober’s gonna put Miss Glad to rest in the sea.”

  I turned toward the Gulf and saw Goober, six feet of skinny arms and stork legs, cussing and trying to balance himself on a stand-up paddleboard. I snorted back a laugh. From thirty feet offshore, Goober looked like a praying mantis afflicted with both Parkinson’s and Turret’s. A shirtless teenage boy paddled the board at the back while Goober did his best to stay upright, holding onto the gold box containing our girl Glad. Goober gave the crowd a stunted wave with his left hand, lost his balance, and somehow managed to pull off a spectacular recovery by wind-milling his left arm and right leg like a pair of yard whirligigs. We all gasped in horror as he teetered, then sighed in relief as his feet settled back on the board.

  I held my breath as Goober took the lid off the glittering gold box. A light breeze blew a little swirl of ashes from the container right into Goober’s face as he swung the box first behind him, then forward and up, as if he were pitching a softball. As Glad’s ashes flew up and out over the Gulf, I saw what looked like a chicken thigh bone fly out of the box and arc against the late afternoon sun. A huge white seagull cried out and grabbed the bone midair. I shriveled for a microsecond in horror and shame.

  But there was no time for self-loathing. With all eyes still on Goober’s lanky frame, he lost his balance again. After tossing the cremains, he lurched backward on the paddleboard like a deranged zombie, overcompensated forward, then leap-frogged face-first into the Gulf with a belly-flop splash. In a flash he surfaced for air, only to be beaned on the noggin by Glad’s gold box. The box found purchase on his bald head and sat there, on an angle, like an ill-designed square space helmet on a sunburned walrus. The crowd went wild with laughter and catcalls.

  To his credit, without missing a hitch, Goober stood up in the thigh-high water, grabbed the box from his head and bowed like an orchestra maestro in top hat and tails. The crowd erupted again into a riot of catcalls, cheers and applause. I have to admit, I laughed so hard I peed my pants a little. I think Glad would have not only approved – she would have done the same.

  Chapter Eight

  After another lonely weekend made blurry by potent cocktails of Tanqueray and tears, on Monday I decided it was time to start getting my life back on track. I ponied up some courage, drove Maggie out to Sunset Beach, and walked through the picket fence toward the crystal blue Gulf. I stopped at the vacant spot in the sand where Glad used to sit. Her absence felt personal and mortifying and raw, like the empty socket of a freshly missing tooth. But like everything in life, it would just take some getting used to. It was a beautiful, sunny day and the pelicans and seagulls were already getting on with their lives, fishing and flying and preening their feathers as they had before Glad or I or mankind had ever walked the Earth.

  Insignificance pressed down hard on my head, making me stare at my feet.

  “You’re as significant as you wanna be, Val,” I heard my old friend say. I smiled sadly and unfolded my chair, then propped it where her lounger used to be. I set my bag on the chair and headed toward the shoreline. If life truly does go on, I might as well get to it.

  After an hour of beachcombing I was a little perkier and a lot more parched. I slipped a beach cover-up over my suit and ducked into Caddy’s for a drink. Three days had passed since Glad’s memorial service, but it appeared that the good folks at Caddy’s were still in mourning. The waitresses were gathered around in a circle sobbing.

  “I still can’t believe he’s gone. It’s just too much,” said Cindy, an impossibly blonde, impossibly tanned waitress who reminded me of Malibu Barbie.

  “He? Don’t you mean she?” I coughed through my bone-dry throat.

  “No…not Glad. Tony. Tony’s dead!” snuffled Cindy between sobs, her face a smear of soggy Cover Girl. “Two in a row. Norma, I can’t take it!”

  Cindy collapsed into Norma’s manly arms.

  “Tony was broke up real bad over Glad,” said Norma, her own rugged face stained with tears. Even though she sported a man’s short cropped hair and a face to match, the hard disguise couldn’t mask Norma’s soft interior. “He hadn’t showed up for work since Glad died a week ago Sunday. Her passin’ probably did him in.”

  Norma patted Cindy’s back like a mother hen and shot me a glance over her shoulder. “Read it for yourself,” she said, pointing a meaty thumb toward a newspaper laying on a nearby table. “Cindy was checking the obits when she saw a familiar face.”

  I knew Tony as the old guy who raked sand and picked up garbage on the beach around Caddy’s. The headline in the St. Petersburg Times article read, “Hoarder Dies Under Ton of Garbage.” Apparently, Tony had been really really into garbage. So much so that he had brought his work home with him. My warped sense of humor made it impossible for me to ignore the delectable irony that Tony had been killed by the very thing that had given his life meaning. Ambushed by a lifetime subscription to National Geographic, I presume. I didn’t really know Tony, and I wasn’t going to cry for him. I’d just learned the hard way that tears didn’t bring anyone back from the dead.

  I leaned over the table and studied the article. A picture of Anthony B. Goldrich, Esq. looking decades younger and clean shaven was, nevertheless, still recognizable as good-old garbage-man Tony. The paper had had a field day with his nasty habit. Below his mugshot was an 8x6, color picture of his living room. Stacks upon stacks of newspapers, garbage bags and beer cans were heaped in huge piles, like an anti-consumerism display at some hip modern art gallery. Tony’s “art” had filled every corner of his home, leaving only narrow trails to squeeze through. As morbidly captivating as that picture was, the third shot was the one that really caught my eye. The backyard. Tucked in amongst hills of discarded chairs and doors and god knows what else, sat a vintage Minnie Winnie nearly concealed by junk. My heart pinged. Could this be the same RV Glad used to make her getaway from Bobby all those years ago?

  I grabbed the paper off the table and read the article word for word. A line break in the news column reported with a comical pun not wasted on me that Tony had been dis-covered by a neighbor, dead of an apparent heart attack after being buried under an avalanche of periodicals. The article reported that Mr. A.B. Goldrich, Esq. had been a lawyer of some repute in Hawesville, Kentucky. He moved to St. Petersburg in 1985 and had worked “in maintenance” at Caddy’s since 1988. A will had been found taped to a bathroom mirror at his residence. According to his lawyer, J.D. Fellows, Anthony Goldrich, “Tony” to his friends, had left all his worldly possessions to someone named Thelma G. Goldrich. The will also stipulated he was to be cremated and buried at sea.

  My heart skipped a beat. Thelma G. Goldrich. Could the G stand for Gladys?

  I needed to find out. Thanks to my new friends in low places, I thought I knew somebody who might be able to help.

  Chapter Nine

  Most people living on the fringe didn’t start out that way. They’d given the world a try and got their spirits crushed. For some, the heartless rat race killed their compassion for anything – including themselves. For others, mindless materialism hollowed them out, making everything seem pointless. But if I had to bet on the number-one reason people gave up and dropped out of normal society, I’d put my money on lost or betrayed love. It’s blown apart more people’s will to keep trying than all other things combined. I fell into this last category. So did Jorge.

  After Glad’s memorial service, I’d learned that Jorge pulled his chips off the table after his wife and children were killed in an automobile accident on I-275. I was shocked to find out he’d been a traffic cop back then. He’d been the first help to arrive on the scene. That was all he had said to me about it, and that had been enough. Eight years had passed, but post-traumatic stress d
isorder and lack of will to live had kept him from holding down a steady job ever since.

  Unlike Jorge, whose demise via lost love had come suddenly, mine had crept in more gradually, almost imperceptibly, like the first mild winter frost. Due to inattentiveness or, I can admit it now, not wanting to see, I had allowed the tapestry of my love life to unravel. Like a rug slowly stripped bare by a moth, thread by thread, until the pattern was compromised and the beauty threadbare, I’d let my life and my love erode away until their value was irretrievably lost. When both had become something no longer worth holding on to, I threw them away, along with a good portion of myself.

  Jorge had told me about losing his family between lubricating slugs of Mr. Dude 20/20 – hands down the worst rotgut I’d ever tasted. Even though he was no longer a cop, I was hoping Jorge still had a couple of friends on the force.

  I wanted to get a look inside that Minnie Winnie behind Tony’s house. Maybe it was Glad’s old escape vehicle from Bobby. Maybe she had still been living in it. Who knows? If it was her RV, then maybe there was something inside it that could put the mystery of Glad’s identity to an end. I needed to do it soon, too. I figured it wouldn’t be long before Pinellas County code enforcement came in and hauled away the RV and the other mountains of junk that made up Tony’s lifetime accumulation of crap.

  ***

  I found Jorge in his usual spot, drinking in his parked car on a side street north of Water Loo’s. Too gun-shy to go into the dump of a restaurant alone, I was told Jorge always waited for backup – namely Goober or Winky – to arrive before making his move. Apparently, no amount of whiskey could help Jorge muster up enough courage to brave a solo run inside – not even to use the toilet. The guys told me Jorge had gotten busted for peeing in the parking lot three or four times already. So far, he’d gotten off with reprimands from sympathetic cops. But nowadays he parked stakeout-style down a side street, away from Water Loo’s greasy windows and the waitresses’ prying eyes.