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

by Margaret Lashley

  “Guys, come look in here!” Jorge called from somewhere in the house.

  “Where are you?” Goober called back. “Say something. We’ll follow your voice.”

  Jorge did one better. He began to sing. In Spanish. Goober and I smiled at each other. It had to be a good sign.

  “Ladies first,” he said, pointing down the hall in the direction of Jorge’s tenor.

  “Always the gentleman,” I replied snidely. I frowned and eyed the newspapers and garbage bags stacked along both walls. There was barely enough room for a rat to get through. “Winky’s fat ass would have never fit,” I muttered. I sucked in my stomach and inched sideways down the hall.

  It took a full minute to squeeze down twelve feet of hallway. At the end, the garbage subsided, revealing a bedroom as orderly as the kitchen and bath. On the edge of a queen-sized bed covered in a white chenille spread, Jorge sat crooning like the leader of a teen boy band. He stopped singing when we entered.

  Jorge shook his head softly. “It was a love story, man. Amor. Take a look.” He handed me a framed picture of Tony and Glad. They were arm in arm, smiling at each other like contented lovebirds.

  “What?” I gasped. Glad had mentioned nothing to me about Tony. My heart pinched from feeling left out of the loop. I started to sulk, then caught myself. “This looks like it was taken a good twenty years ago.”

  “Secret lovers. The best kind,” Jorge said dreamily.

  “Secret lovers my ass,” said Goober. “Find anything else, lover boy?”

  “Jes, Señor Suave. I found t’ree chooboxes of letters and photos and stuff. They must have been together for years. There’s a Polaroid of them in Hawaii from 1998, with hotel receipts and those little drink umbrellas. They kept everything.”

  “No surprise there,” Goober said sarcastically. “This guy didn’t even toss his cookies.”

  “Come on, Goober. Where’s your sense of romance?” I teased.

  “Romance? What the hell’s that?” Goober threw his hands in the air. “It’ll take us hours to sort through all this shit, and this place smells like a monkey’s ass. I say let’s take the boxes and get the hell out of here. This place is getting on my nerves.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take the three boxes home tonight. It was my idea, so I’ll do the dirty work of sorting through them.”

  “Suits me,” said Goober. Jorge nodded.

  I had lied about my motive for wanting the boxes. But it was a white lie – the so-called polite kind of lie we women in the South were weaned on. I was practically dying of curiosity to find out more about Glad. But beyond that truth was another, bigger one: I couldn’t fathom trusting these guys with Glad and Tony’s personal belongings. The thought of Goober or Winky or Jorge pawing thoughtlessly through the remains of their life together gave me heartburn. I knew these guys had been Glad’s friends too, but that didn’t make the thought feel any better. It still seemed wrong. Really, really wrong. Plus, I was hurt that Glad hadn’t mentioned her relationship with Tony to me. Unless he was her true love lost? And to be brutally honest, I didn’t want to be the last to know what else she might have kept a secret.

  “Guys,” I said, “Glad and Tony kept their relationship quiet for some reason. Let’s not blow it for them now. Not yet. At least not until we find out more about it.”

  “No problemo,” said Jorge.

  “Okay,” agreed Goober. “Fine. Whatever it takes to get us out of here!”

  “I guess we’ve got what we need for now,” I said. “We can try the RV later if this doesn’t pan out.”

  We put the three shoeboxes in a garbage bag and Goober balanced them on top of his bald head like one of those jug-carrying desert wanderers. We inched our way back to the kitchen, then exited the house. Jorge locked the door behind us. Relief swept over me as I took in a deep breath of hot, humid outside air – as fresh as it got in St. Pete in July.

  “Remember, we tell no one,” I said as we crunched through the dry gravel along the side yard. Both men nodded a silent oath as we rounded the corner and walked toward the squad car. As soon as we came into view, Winky jumped out of the vehicle and ran toward us, waving his arms wildly.

  “Coast is clear!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Nobody seen us!”

  I cringed and turned to Goober and Jorge. “That means not a word to Winky, either.”

  “That really goes without saying, Val,” Goober said dryly and rolled his eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  Since Glad’s death, I’d let the stooges creep into my world, little by little. Like a stray cat you give a meal to, then a name, then wake up one day to find pawing at you in bed, wanting something you weren’t sure you wanted to give. Unlike that hypothetical cat, however, I hadn’t allowed any of these strays into my bed. Not yet, anyway. I took comfort in that. I still had some kind of standards. Maybe I should call these guys the Schrodinger’s cats. Until I am actually observed screwing one of them, my dignity can remain undetermined, both dubious and intact.

  The irony that I was growing increasingly reliant on three of the world’s most unreliable men was par for the pothole-laden course that was my life to date. In fact, bizarre events and situations like this had, over the past 48 years, shaped me into one of irony’s biggest admirers. If someone ever did a biography on me, they might even say I founded my life on pillars of irony. Even so, the most ironic twist of them all had to be my experience with Glad – the woman who taught me to enjoy life again, then died and left me in agony. Her passing reminded me that irony had a dark side. Maybe even a mean streak. Actually, I was beginning to think irony could be a downright bitch.

  ***

  I left my partners in crime at Caddy’s and drove home with the three boxes of booty lifted from Tony’s place. I parked Maggie in the assigned spot behind my apartment and hit the switch to close the convertible top. I found my girlie hotrod four months ago. Landing in the States with no credit and not a dime to spare, I had tried living without a car for three months. But then the summer heat kicked in and fried my will to walk. So I’d scoured the FSBO ads and found Maggie. After seeing the price and the owner financing option, it was love at first sight.

  Lots of small imperfections had taken her worth down bigtime, but she still retained her classic beauty. Besides, what was a little rust and a couple of dents among friends? Lately I’d had plenty of hard lessons on the topic of beauty running deeper than shiny surface veneer. Truth be told, a few weeks ago I didn’t think I had any veneer left. But Glad’s advice had changed me. I now looked at perfection not as a goal, but as an overrated illusion designed to keep us anxious and dissatisfied. I guess you could say that, under Glad’s guidance, my philosophy on achieving personal perfection had changed from fix it to screw it.

  Being fifty-six years old, it takes Maggie a couple of minutes to drag her ragtop out of its compartment behind the backseat and shimmy it slowly over her chassis like a tired-ass hooker giving it one last go. She bitches the whole time, too, whining like an overwrought can opener. I used to fidget impatiently waiting for her to finally flop the canvas top onto the chrome windshield frame. Now I kind of like that she takes her time. Just as Glad had, Maggie reminded me to relax and breathe and live and let live. Chill. You’ve got time, Kiddo.

  I cut the ignition and snapped the heavy chrome clips down to clamp the ragtop in place. Then I cranked the windows shut and grabbed the garbage bag on the seat next to me. A garbage bag containing the life of Glad’s garbage-loving man. I savored another taste of bittersweet irony.

  I slung the bag over my shoulder and climbed the rickety wooden stairs to my home-sweet-home. No larger than the double garage it sat above, my apartment wasn’t a bad place, all in all. Built in the 1920s, it had wooden floors, built-in cabinets and lots of windows. Having said that, the floors slanted like a funhouse, the painted-shut drawers required dynamite to open, and the original, single-pane windows provided absolutely no insulation or soundproofing whatsoever. I could ac
tually hear the neighbor two doors down raking his leaves – among other things.

  But the location was cool. Weather permitting, it was an easy walk to the bars and restaurants downtown. From the top of my stairs I could see the eccentric, pink-and-white spire of the Vinoy Hotel. It jutted into the sky like a whitewashed Greek temple encircling a pink, amputated stump, capped with an improbable terracotta tile roof. In the last twenty years, this fallen sister of the famous St. Pete Beach Don Cesar Hotel had transformed itself from a twenty-dollar-a-pop flop house for degenerates into a fancy destination resort commanding around three hundred bucks a night. The surrounding neighborhood and downtown area were being dragged along for the gentrification ride in fits and starts of redevelopment.

  At the moment, restored turn-of-the-century mansions sat next to run-down concrete duplexes from the 1960s. New, million-dollar condo towers butted up to dubious liquor stores and weed–infested vacant lots. St. Petersburg’s schizophrenic state left it harboring places where people of all economic strata could feel both at home and ill at ease. Given my questionable standing in the social hierarchy, the confusion was a perfect fit.

  Like most of Florida’s beautiful places, I knew St. Pete was doomed to be pounded and pulverized into a sanitized Disneyland for the rich. I figured she still had a few good years left before she gave up the struggle and became a generic, chain-store smoking ghost of her former self. I already saw it happening before my eyes. The certainty made me determined to enjoy St. Pete’s final funky days while they lasted, and while I could still afford the rent. After that, well, I guess I’d just have to wait and see what life sent my way.

  I held back the rickety screen door to my apartment with my right foot. I balanced the garbage bag on my left shoulder while I fiddled with the key in the front door. When it finally cracked open, the air-conditioned breeze emanating from inside felt like an arctic blast against the sweltering heat and humidity of outside. I pushed my way in, set the garbage bag down on the couch and kicked off my sandals.

  Thirsty, I opened the rusty door on the fridge. A lonely jar of olives stared back at me through bloodshot, pimiento corneas. Their only companions were a pint of half-and-half, a bottle of tonic water and a banana on the verge of imitating the ones I’d seen earlier today at Tony’s house. I fished around in the vegetable drawer and found a plastic bag amongst the dried-up potatoes with their spindly white shoots. Inside the bag was a tiny key lime not much bigger than a grape. My lucky day! I opened the freezer and pulled out the half-gallon jug of Tanqueray. My green goddess of goodness. The one real splurge I still allowed myself. I poured a generous portion in a glass, added two ice cubes, a squeeze of lime and some tonic. Presto! Instant TNT. Life is not that bad.

  Libation in hand, I turned my attention to the shoeboxes. I pulled them out of the garbage bag one by one. They weren’t labeled. I figured Tony just kept throwing stuff into a box until it was full, then sealed it with duct tape and started a new one. That theory in mind, I was surprised when I peeled the tape off the first box and found it neatly arranged inside. Everything was sorted by year with index cards, like a homemade filing cabinet. The index cards in the first box spanned from 1945 to 1974.

  I took a long drink of my TNT and pulled out the papers for 1945. A yellowed newspaper clipping from April 24th 1945 edition of the Hancock Clarion announced the birth of daughter Gladys Kinsey, firstborn child to Mr. & Mrs. Roy G. Kinsey.

  Hmmm. This must be Glad’s stuff, not Tony’s. A faded, black-and-white picture was paper-clipped to the article. It showed a surprisingly old couple for the time, probably in their early forties, proudly holding a bundled baby. I presumed they were Glad’s parents.

  The next index card skipped to 1950. It housed a small collection of grade-school mementos. A photo of a girl about age five, standing in front of her parents in a fancy petticoat dress, tiny white gloves, ankle socks and patent-leather shoes. The hat on her mom’s head and the basket of eggs hanging on her father’s arm made the occasion obvious. The back of the photo simply read, “Easter 1951.” A faded, red, construction-paper valentine from a boy named Timmy nearly fell apart when I unfolded it. Scrawled in a child’s hand was the inscription, “I love you, sis.” Another picture showed a gangly, blonde girl around age ten holding a kitten in her arms. Even at that young age anyone could tell that Glad was destined to become a tall, classic beauty.

  I put the pictures back in their tidy filing space and pulled out the contents labeled 1964. There was just a single letter addressed to Miss Gladys Kinsey, postmarked December 12, 1964. I unfolded the letter and a black-and-white photo fell onto my lap. It showed an exhausted-looking girl lying in bed holding a tiny baby. The sad, desperate look in the girl’s eyes didn’t jive with it being a happy occasion. Her tired, drawn face reminded me of Glad’s – the day I found her dead on her beach lounger.

  The letter itself was written on the official stationery of a boy’s academy in Huntsville, Alabama. It read:

  My Dearest Gladys,

  I wish I could be there with you now. My parents have seen to it that I can’t. I am virtually a prisoner here. I have no money and no phone privileges. My father’s influence over the faculty here has me under tight surveillance. I’m even escorted between classes. I hope this letter reaches you. If it does, it will be because my roommate Jacob was able to smuggle it off campus and post it.

  But my worries are nothing compared to yours. I don’t know what to say, Gladys. I love you doesn’t seem to be worth much. I’m sorrier than you can know about the situation I’ve left you in. I hope you know that I would marry you today if I could. I vow one day to make up for what I’ve put you through.

  I’m hoping against hope that I will be able to get your letters, if you choose to write me. I’ll leave that up to you, Gladys. Just know that you have my love no matter what you decide. I only ask, if you do write to me, that you let me know if it’s a boy or a girl.

  Forever in my heart,

  Anthony

  Holy mackerel! Glad and Tony had a child together? I flipped the envelope over to check for a mailing address. It was sent to Miss Gladys Kinsey in care of Mrs. H. E. Wannabaker, Coolidge Street, Hawesville, KY.

  I took out a notepad and wrote down the address, along with Glad’s full name and date of birth from the newspaper announcement. I also noted a general date of birth for her baby. Sometime in the fall of 1964, most likely. The math told me Glad was no more than nineteen at the time. Back then a single girl rarely got to keep a so-called illegitimate baby. It usually became a shameful secret, shipped off to a faraway family member or an adoption agency. I hoped Mrs. Wannabaker was still alive to tell the tale. But probably not. After all, this had happened nearly a half century ago.

  Chapter Eleven

  I woke the next morning to the sound of my cellphone buzzing. It was Jamie. I already knew what she wanted, and I had been dreading the call. Still, I owed it to her to pick up. I practiced saying her name out loud a few times to kill the hangover frog in my throat. “Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” I croaked, then punched the green button on my cellphone.

  “Hey Jamie,” I said.

  “Hey Val,” she said back.

  I bit my lip through about ten seconds of silence, then cracked. “You just calling to see if I’m still alive? Nice of you.”

  “Come on, Val. You know why I’m calling. You’ve got to deliver a synopsis for your story by Monday if you want to have a chance at being awarded a book contract.”

  Damn! I truly was a master of self-sabotage. During the last few months with Glad, I’d let idleness creep into my soul and eat away most of what had remained of my tattered ambition. Uninspired and unemployed are two situations a writer can’t afford, and here I was staring both in the face like evil twins. I needed a lie, and I needed one quick.

  “You’re in luck, then. I’m working on a new idea based in Kentucky,” I said, winging it. “About a girl who had a baby back in the 1960s and had to give it away.”


  “What’s the plot line?”

  “It’s set in modern day. The bastard kid has grown up and is set to inherit a fortune, but first he has to be found.”

  “How did he get lost?”

  “I’m still working on that.”

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s what I’ve got so far.”

  “Then you’d better get your ass in gear!” Jami coughed out a single, sharp, cynical laugh. “Remember, synopsis by Monday.” Then she hung up.

  I padded over to the kitchen and made myself a double espresso with the help of Mr. Coffee, the only truly reliable man in my life. I took a sip and thought about Jamie Diesel. She really did deserve better from me. She’d pulled some strings to get me a shot with her publisher nearly three months ago. I’d had all that time to get a storyline together and I hadn’t come up with squat. I guess Tanqueray wasn’t as inspirational as I thought.

  Jamie was the sole person who still acknowledged my professional existence when I returned from Europe almost a year ago. She had been the only one to throw me a lifeline and a chance to climb back aboard my floundering writing career. She was a writer, too, and had a desk job with a small, independent publisher in New York. She kept me up-to-date on publishers looking for novels in my genre – mysteries with a strong female lead. I should have been more grateful. After all, I may have been pillaged by a German pirate, but I wasn’t sunk yet. With any luck, maybe I could turn Glad’s story of Blowjob Betty into a novel and help her heir and myself at the same time. Double Booty. Hmmm. Not a bad working title.

  I looked over at Glad’s boxes, then back at the blank screen of my computer. Maybe there really was some way to make this work….

  ***

  When I arrived back to the States, my eight-year-old laptop might as well have been a dinosaur turd. I crawled out on an optimistic limb and forked out $600 on an all-in-one touch screen computer with a plug-in, full-sized, real keyboard. I was an old-school, ten-finger typist. On-screen keyboards and tiny laptops were for two-finger peckers. Amateurs. The call from Jamie had turned up the heat. I needed to deliver a five-hundred word book synopsis. I still had almost a week to do it. I hoped digging into Glad’s history would provide some interesting plot points. Kill two tough, old birds with one lazy-ass stone.