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

by Margaret Lashley

  “Fine.” I thought about telling Jacob about the trip I was taking tomorrow, but decided to withhold the information, for the moment.

  “This certainly is a neighborhood for the ‘haves,’” Jacob said, pointing to the collection of opulent pleasure boats and catamarans that bobbed in the Vinoy Club yacht basin across the street from the snooty, pink, wedding cake of a hotel.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, Val, are you a ‘have’ or a ‘have not?’”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘have.’ I ‘have’ bills. I ‘have’ doubts. I ‘have not’ money, if that’s what you mean.”

  Jacob eyed me almost suspiciously, then gestured for me to sit down on the bench next to him. As I did, something caught my eye. It was the sharp contrast between the grey, faded wood of the bench and the fresh, clean wood of the new armrest recently installed in the middle of it. How ingenious. And apropos. St. Pete had found the perfect, politically correct solution to keeping penniless people from turning the benches into bedsteads. The new armrests made it impossible to lie down across the bench. Score another one for the “haves.”

  “So how about you, Jacob? Are you a ‘have’ or ‘have not?’ By the way, what’s your last name?”

  “Oh, I’d say I’m a ‘have not,’ on the way to being ‘have not-er,’” Jacob joked, then laughed dryly. “You said you’re short on time, Val. Should we get to it? What else do you want to know?”

  “I need to know everything you know about Glad and Tony’s baby. What could have happened to Thelma? Where she might be. I guess I was hoping to hear about whatever clues you might have picked up along the way.”

  “You want the long version or the short one? Either way, it doesn’t add up to much.”

  I sighed. Then I remembered Tom’s words. He said cases often get solved by gut feelings. I had a gut feeling Jacob had some of the answers, whether he knew it himself or not. The more information I could get out of him, the more data I’d have to sort through myself.

  “I guess I’ll take the long version.”

  “Okay. Where’d we leave off? Oh yeah, Glad moved into the RV. Wait. Before I forget, when she first got to my sister’s, Ang and I took pictures of the bruises on Glad’s arms and legs. It was awful. Glad was damn near a walking skeleton. Ang had one of those old 8mm cameras at the time, so we made a movie of Glad, crazy as she was, talking about how the devil had done all that damage to her. Well, we all knew who the devil really was. So would anybody with half a brain, we figured.

  “So Ang and I got the paperwork and filled it out for Glad to press charges against Bobby. We didn’t mention the baby in the court proceedings. We thought it would have been too much for Glad at the time. The real focus was to get Bobby in the slammer and pronto. The last thing we needed was him to come snooping around and find her. So Glad signed the papers and, well, we showed the judge the pictures and the home movie, and it was pretty much a slam dunk. Bobby went to jail for felony assault and Glad went back to hiding in that RV.”

  “Wow. Do you still have the pictures or the home movie?”

  “Yeah, somewhere I guess. At Ang’s probably. Do you really want to see them?”

  “Maybe. Not really. You know, Jacob, Glad never mentioned having a baby to me. What happened to it?”

  “I’m getting to that. Like I said, Glad was in real bad shape when we found her. Not just physically. She was scared as a whipped puppy. It took her a good three months of living in the RV before she felt safe enough to peek her head out. She still believed that devil Bobby was coming back to get her. Anyway, Ang called me one day saying she’d had a breakthrough with Glad. I drove down to see what she was talking about.”

  “So, what had happened?”

  “I don’t exactly know for sure. It was like that RV full of butterflies was some kind of magic chrysalis or something for Glad. Ang had a routine of checking on Glad a couple times a day. She’d bring meals to her in the RV. When she did, Glad was usually staring off into never-never land or sleeping. But one day Ang walked in and Glad sat up and started talking. It was still kind of crazy talk, but any talking was good in Glad’s case.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Mumbo jumbo, mostly. Bobby must have brainwashed her good. She said crazy religious stuff like the devil was after her. That the devil himself had chosen her virgin child among all others or something like that. One thing I remember for sure was that Glad said Jesus sent ‘the butterfly’ to save her.”

  “The butterfly? To save who? Glad or her baby?”

  “Hmmm. I don’t rightly know.”

  “How had a butterfly saved her?”

  “As far as I could tell, it hadn’t. She was crazy. But you know, Val, there’s moments in life you can hardly believe, even though you lived through ’em yourself. I asked Glad pretty much the same question – how had a butterfly saved her. You know what she did? She reached a hand into her mouth, pulled out her top dentures and handed them to me. I was so floored I couldn’t do anything but take ’em. Glad stared at me for a minute, then she told me to look on the back of her teeth. I did, and I’ll be damned. Glued to the back of her dentures was a little silver piece of jewelry with green crystals on it. She told Ang and me that the butterfly had left it for her so she could find Thelma again.”

  I shivered despite the late afternoon heat. “That…that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I told you. She was crazy back then. It took another year of coaxing for us to sort out that Glad’s mom had given her a pin shaped like a butterfly. Glad had worn it all the time in memory of her dead mother. But one day Bobby punched her on the shoulder and broke it. After that, Glad kept the main part of the brooch pinned to the inside of her baby Thelma’s diaper. The broken part she kept glued to her dentures.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she was crazy – like a fox. Glad said her dentures were the safest place to keep something because Bobby had quit hitting her in the mouth by then. He didn’t want to have to pay for another set of new teeth. Probably wouldn’t have bought the first set if he didn’t have to keep up appearances with his customers…the church people. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to change the baby’s diaper. Pretty clever of her, if you think about it.”

  I thought about it. It really was clever.

  “Anyway, from then on Glad kept the main part of the brooch on the baby and the broken-off piece glued to her dentures so that they would always be connected. I guess she thought it was some kind of talisman against harm. Maybe she thought the butterfly was her mom protecting her from up in heaven. Whatever she thought, I guess it didn’t work, because one day baby Thelma just up and disappeared.”

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “That’s the saddest part of all. Years later, when Glad was a lot better, almost back to herself even, she confessed to me that she wasn’t sure what happened to her daughter. She said she woke up one day and baby Thelma was gone. When she told me that, Glad broke down and cried like nothing I’ve ever seen before or hope to see again.”

  Jacob looked away for a moment and studied the boats in the harbor. A fat grey squirrel ran by carrying a peanut in its mouth. Jacob watched it run along the edge of the sidewalk past our bench. He turned back to face me and continued.

  “Glad had blanked out a lot of memories. Self-preservation, I guess. Anyway, she said she could have been the one who got rid of Thelma. She could have given her away or left her somewhere. She knew first-hand that Bobby was a ticking time bomb. She remembered fearing for Thelma’s safety so much she could hardly sleep or eat. Giving Thelma away for her own good might have won out over Glad’s own desire to keep her. Considering Bobby’s violent temper and the sheer misery of their situation, Glad confessed she thought that maybe those people at the mercy home had been right. She should have given Thelma up for adoption.”

  I tried to picture Glad back then. I couldn’t imagine how desperate she must have been. I didn’t want to imagine it
. “Poor Glad! Do you think she did? Get rid of her baby herself, I mean?”

  “Who knows? She could have. But my money’s on Bobby. After all, he was paid five grand to make the baby disappear. And after Thelma vanished, Glad said Bobby took great delight in torturing her by saying he saw the devil himself come and steal the bastard child away. One time he even told her he saw the devil tear Thelma to shreds and eat her. He gave Glad a lock of blonde hair as proof. Glad hid the hair away, like she did the butterfly pin. She showed the hair to my sister Ang, but it turned out to be plastic threads like from a Barbie doll head.”

  My heart sank. “So Thelma’s probably dead.”

  “Probably. But I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anybody, Val. I wanted proof, and the only person I figured knew for sure was Bobby Munch, the devil himself.”

  “What are you saying, Jacob?”

  “Bobby did twelve years at Appalach’. Part for what he did to Glad, the other for embezzling church funds. When I found out Bobby was getting out, me and a friend of mine made a plan. Bobby didn’t know either one of us. When he came marching out, wasn’t nobody waiting for him. I told that buck-toothed asshole that my friend had just got out of the slammer, too. We invited Bobby along for some whiskeys and beers to celebrate. Believe me, he didn’t need much convincing. After we got him good and drunk we threw him in the back of the truck. You know, there’s lots of woods up there near Chattahoochee. Lots of places no one can hear a man scream.”

  Another shiver went down my spine. I scooted a few inches down the bench away from Jacob. I watched his face grow cold and bitter as he spoke.

  “When morning came around, we were about as far from earshot as a man can get. Bobby woke up on the ground hog-tied and hungover. Now Val, I’m a Southern gentleman. I asked Bobby politely what he did with baby Thelma, but he wasn’t talking. Well, I’m a man who believes in Old Testament justice. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. I figured Bobby owed Glad about ten teeth. So I got out a set of pliers and got to work. I was fair about it. I gave him a chance to talk between each tooth. He hollered plenty. But he never confessed. I guess prison taught him how to tolerate pain. Or maybe he figured losing his choppers was better than another stint in the hoosegow. Or death row for murdering the baby.”

  Jacob laughed bitterly and looked out toward the harbor again. He turned back to face me with a sadistic grin that made my spine squirm.

  “Just for fun, I left Bobby’s two front teeth alone,” he said coolly. “When we untied him and drove off, he looked like a bloody, bucktoothed rat. He tried to cuss us, but he couldn’t say squat with that mangled mouth. We might not a got any information out of Bobby Munch, but we sure as hell got our revenge.”

  “What happened to Bobby after that?” I asked, trying not to sound horrified.

  Jacob’s smile evaporated. “What do I care? At that point, he was worthless to me. I didn’t have any more reason to see his sorry ass again.”

  “Did you tell Glad what you did?”

  Jacob shook his head almost violently. “No! I figured there was no use opening up old wounds. Glad was in pretty good shape by then. A little skittish, but well enough. For years she had begged me not to tell Tony that I’d found her. She’d needed all that time to recover. But a week or two before Bobby got out, she’d asked to see Tony for the first time. I didn’t want to set her back and mess that up.”

  “I get it. But tell me Jacob, if things were so bad with Bobby, why didn’t Glad just leave him?”

  “If you’d seen her, you wouldn’t be asking. I’m sure she figured no one would have her. Bobby made damn sure she was no looker no more.”

  I gazed across the street at a small sailboat as it bobbed in the harbor. Its long, thin mast pointed up to a pale blue sky already fading to pink at the edges. Jacob’s story had drained me of something vital. It was getting late and I still had to pack for the trip tomorrow. In the hot, humid twilight, the white lights strung in the oak canopies glistened eerily, like Christmas Eve in hell.

  “I’ve got to go, Jacob.”

  “Sure. Just one more thing. You said you found papers. Was one Glad’s birth certificate? Or her daughter’s?”

  “Uh…no. Just a marriage certificate.”

  Jacob’s shoulders straightened. “So you still don’t have any proof her daughter existed. Except for what I told you and that letter from Tony to Glad.”

  “Right.”

  Something in Jacob’s eyes changed that made me even more uncomfortable. I got up to go. “I’ll touch base again next week,” I said and took a step toward home.

  Jacob reached out and grabbed my arm. My skin crawled to the top of my head. I wanted to scream, but held my breath. Jacob stared intently in my eyes and said, “Just wanted to shake your hand goodbye.”

  I blew out a breath of relief. You’ve watched too many scary movies, Val! I tried to convince myself nothing creepy was going on. Still, I couldn’t deny that contact with Jacob’s hand had sent an ice cube up my spine.

  I let go of Jacob’s hand and walked quickly through the park, relief growing along with the distance between us. Jumpy, I fought the urge to look back as I waited for the light to change at the corner of Beach Drive and Fifth Avenue. Like a kid who just heard a story about a hook-handed murderer, I hurriedly jerked and skipped my way north on Beach.

  I passed a row of cars parked across the road just a block from my apartment. In the fading light of dusk I could make out the form of a person sitting in the driver’s seat of one of the cars. The plump figure turned its face away from me as I walked by, and I thought I saw a row of white, sausage-like links trailing down its back.

  ***

  I told my body to keep walking like nothing happened. It probably wasn’t her. But my body wasn’t listening. My right knee buckled and I nearly fell face-first on the sidewalk. I recovered in time to save my healing nose from certain annihilation, but it cost me a turned ankle. My heart thumped like a drum in my ears. I limped as fast as I could the rest of the way to my apartment. My thoughts whooshed by blankly like a speeding car down a pitch black stretch of country road. What is going on here?

  My aching ankle made climbing the stairs a bitch. Getting the key in the lock was worse. My hands shook so badly I dropped the rattling bundle of keys three times. Finally, I took a deep breath to steady myself. With the focused idiocy of a well-hammered drunk I managed to get the right key in the hold. I hobbled inside. I slammed the door and jerked the deadbolt in place – the first time I’d done so since moving in. All I could think of was to call Tom. He answered on the second ring.

  “I saw her! I think I saw her!”

  “Val? Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me! I think I saw her!”

  “Okay. Slow down. Who did you see?”

  “Thelma Goldrich!”

  “The daughter? That’s great!”

  “No! The other one. The one who punched me in the nose!”

  The line was silent for a few seconds. “Where?” Tom asked. His tone had turned dead sober.

  “On the street near my apartment. In a car.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I saw her ponytail. I mean, I think it was her ponytail.” I fought rising hysteria. “How many people have a ponytail like that?”

  “Okay, Val. Calm down. I got you. I’ll check it out. Where did you see her exactly?”

  Tom’s calm demeanor caused something inside me to relax. The whooshing inside my head stopped and I took a breath. It felt like I hadn’t breathed in a long time.

  “She was parked on Beach Drive between Seventh and Eighth.”

  “I’m on it. Now get some rest. You’re going to need it for the trip. See you around eight tomorrow morning. Good night, Val.”

  “Good night, Tom. And thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. One more thing, Val. Make sure your doors and windows are locked.”

  Tom clicked off the phone and th
e whooshing sound came roaring back inside my head. I ran around the apartment, checking each window lock. Then, for good measure, I pushed on the deadbolt slide with all my might. I grabbed a beer from the fridge, then I plopped onto my hideous couch, hugged a lumpy brown pillow and tried not to think.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I had to hand it to him, Tom was a man with a plan. Overnight he had set quite a few gears into motion, including a scheme to keep an eye on the whereabouts of “Bulldog Bitch” Thelma Goldrich so we could drive up to meet “loony-bin” Thelma Goldrich. I never knew irony could get so weird.

  “More coffee?” I asked.

  Tom leaned back comfortably on my wrinkled old lump of a couch. The contrast between the ugly brown sofa and his clean, shiny good looks was almost blinding. Tom’s white sport shirt and crisp ironed jeans made him look like Mr. Clean – with a really good blonde toupee. In fact, compared to Tom, everything in my apartment looked dull and dingy and faded. Including me.

  “Sure. That’s good coffee, Val.”

  I reached for Tom’s cup and he took my hand in his, tugging me gently toward him. My apartment shrank to the size of a closet and my heart pounded in my ears. I pulled my hand away.

  “I’m glad you like it. It’s my special blend.”

  “I like your special blend,” Tom teased.

  I cringed out a smile and padded over to the coffee machine in my tiny kitchen. My neck was as hot as the coffee carafe. I forced myself to practice deep, yoga breath while I filled his cup. I bit my lip and resolved not to make a fool of myself. When I handed Tom his coffee, he patted the sofa next to him, but I didn’t dare sit down. A shitty voice inside my head said it was too good to be true. Unfortunately, I listened. I remained standing and asked Tom for details on his plan.

  “So what are we going to do, specifically?”

  Tom’s face shifted to neutral and my mood switched to disappointed self-loathing. He explained that Goober was to drive his dodgy Dodge over to Bimini Circle and stake out Tony’s old house. Jorge was to park his Buick on my street and surveil my apartment. Anyone sighting Bulldog Woman was to report back to him, then follow her discreetly back to her hideout.