Baby Daddy Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  “Those two were always poking at each other,” I said. “They were on that swinging rope bridge over the chasm at the top of Lookout Mountain. Joyce smacked Eddie for doing something stupid. Think he stuck his pointing finger in her eye so she couldn’t see the view.” On a clear day, Lookout Mountain boasted a view of seven states. Hard to beat entertainment like that back in the sixties.

  “And then Eddie fell. Got his foot caught in one of those rope loops on that swinging bridge,” said Veenie. “He hung upside down by one foot, arms flapping. He was scrawny. With that white feathery hair, he looked just like a scalded chicken hanging off that rope bridge.”

  I gulped a sludge of coffee. “Squawked like one too.”

  “Well everything turned out all right in the end.”

  “Well, some of it anyway,” I said.

  Eddie and Joyce had not killed one another. Eddie, now almost fifty, still wore white bell bottoms and Aerosmith T-shirts, lived in a refurbished Bunny Bread truck, and push-mowed yards for a living. Joyce lived on the edge of Bloomington in one of those new uppity theme-oriented suburbs. Tara was her theme. The place was filled with imitation plantation houses with Greek columns and carriage turnarounds.

  Joyce was married to an insurance salesman from Atlanta who had his face glued to every inch of billboard he could rent along the back roads. He even had a full length of himself dressed in a Southern Civil War uniform painted onto the limestone ledge just outside Tunnelton, right next to the “Jesus Saves” graffiti. Smart move because locals always slowed to gawk when they approached the Jesus graffiti. No one dared paint over the graffiti, just in case it was a true sign from the Holy Ghost. The “Jesus Saves” graffiti even had its own graffiti. Below it someone had slop-painted with a brush, “Moses Invests.”

  Joyce was a bit uppity, so her home fit her attitude. She sometimes pretended not to know her Knobby Waters kin when we crossed paths at the Golden Corral all-you-can-stomach Monday night smorgasbord on State Road 36. Her Facebook page claimed her hometown was Bloomington, not Knobby Waters.

  When it came to children, I’d long ago decided you got what the good Lord dished out. It was all potluck. A mess of genetics, I reckon. It was like God was a blind man trying to bake a cake with whatever was leftover in the cabinet. The ingredients were all there, but the proportions might be way off. You didn’t know that, of course, until it was too late.

  I had somehow expected more of motherhood. What I had expected I couldn’t quite say. Of course, next to Veenie, I was blessed. Veenie’s ex, Fergus Goens Senior, wasn’t worth the clay and spit it took for the good Lord to mold him. Fergus owed Veenie forty-plus years of child support for their son, Fergie Junior, who was holed up in my cellar next to my canned goods. He slept all day and roamed the house all night like a sick possum. He had two college degrees in musicology, some talent, and not a spit bit of ambition.

  Veenie had once tried to run down her husband, Fergus Senior, but not lately. Lately she was resigned to the fact that Fergus was wasted space. She saved her strength these days for important stuff, like binge eating deep-fried Twinkies on a stick at the Pawpaw County Fair. She’d given up trying to get Fergus, whose greatest career achievement had been a year of sobriety spent drilling holes in the paperboard backs of TV sets at the Sylvania plant to pony-up and support his progeny.

  Fergus liked to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, drunk dial Veenie, and shout at her that she should be grateful because he had given her the gift of her life, Fergie Junior, and that she should be paying him for that.

  To which Veenie always replied, “Well that’s debatable.”

  Finding something of interest about Bromley online, I stopped cold in my scrolling through web pages.

  Veenie scooted next to me on her roller-powered office chair. She peered over the top of her thick glasses. She munched on a day-old donut with one hand while popping Tums with the other.

  “Will you look at that,” I said to Veenie, my finger pressed against the screen. We were staring at a photo taken at the Knobby Waters Christmas Parade last year. Avonelle was the grand marshal. She was sitting up on the back seat ridge of a red convertible, courtesy of Sammy Spray’s Ford Dealership over in Salem, waving like the queen with one white-gloved hand. She was wearing a fur coat that made her look like a well-groomed bear. A tall fur hat covered the crown of her apricot hair. She was scowling into the camera. A gathering of red roses was tucked into her left arm crook.

  It wasn’t Avonelle who I was pointing at though. It was something blurry in the background, along the sidewalk in front of the bank parking lot. There stood a man, also wearing a fur hat. It had fur earflaps, like the kind of hat a Russian might wear. It was cold, so his face was hunkered down inside his coat collar. He was breathing a frosty cloud. He was clearly talking with a woman who stood pressed up against him in the crowd. The woman wore gunmetal glasses and had dark hair stuffed under a hand-knitted grass green hat that had a shawl knitted in, making it a one-piece winter ensemble. Sheriff Boots Gibson, dressed as Santa Claus, was strolling by, throwing out penny candy and candy canes.

  Veenie whipped off her glasses and tilted the computer screen closer to her nose. “Holy corn dog. Is that …?” She looked up at me.

  “I think so. Looks to be.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  We agreed that they were looking at a photo of one of the Apple twins engaged in a heated discussion with Barbara Skaggs. The question was which one?

  Half an hour later, Veenie was off to the traveling Medicare RV, which parked behind the Wal-Mart the middle of every month. It was time for her annual heart checkup with Dr. Doohickey. I was sitting in a molded plastic orange chair in the waiting area at the Apple Dental Care Clinic. I always wondered whose butt they used to make molded plastic chairs. Certainly not mine. I did a good bit of twisting trying to find a comfortable spot.

  The place was crawling with children throwing crayons and Legos at one another. One especially adventurous girl stuck crayons up both her nostrils. She was panting like she might be in need of a medical intervention. There was another adult woman in the waiting area, but she was plugged into her iPhone pretending she didn’t know the children, who screamed “Mom!” at her every now and then. The gum-snapping receptionist was chatting on the speakerphone with a patient in pain, while trying to type a new patient’s medical billing data into a computer. She looked up at me and pointed down a hallway. “He’ll see you now,” she said. “Door at the end of the hallway.”

  I scooted toward the hallway, stopping to pull one of the crayons out of the girl’s nose along the way.

  Bert Apple was a tall man with his mother’s overgenerous nose and icy blue eyes. His teeth were the color and size of Chiclets. His hair was thin, wheat brown, but graying. It covered his head like a helmet. His ears were long, shaped like narrow sandals. They lay neatly flat against his head. He wore a white lab coat with a red plastic pocket protector that had Apple Dentistry printed on it in old English script, with a caricature of a giant red apple that also had a Chiclets smile.

  “How can I help?” he asked.

  We were seated in Bert’s office. On the desk was a paperweight/pencil holder combo shaped like a giant set of dentures. A gold-gilded photo of Avonelle sitting on an upholstered fainting couch surrounded by her two sons, their wives, and their children, sat prominently next to the giant dentures. The photo was maybe ten years old. According to the rumor mill, Bert’s wife had packed up their three kids and scooted back north to Gary, where she’d come from, a few years back. Bromley’s wife and one daughter were still in town.

  I nodded at the photo. “My condolences about your brother. Terrible shame. So young.”

  Bert sighed and thanked me. He looked tired, weary even. “Not everyone shares your sorrow.”

  I pondered that. “Do you?”

  He straightened his denture pencil holder and looked at me a little sad-eyed. “Course I do. Bromley was a great dentist. Neat. Precise. Like Mother.�
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  “But not such a great person?”

  He shrugged.

  “Can you think of anyone who’d want to harm your brother?”

  “Honestly? Loads. Did you talk to his wife, Gretal? I’d start there.”

  “Was he unfaithful?”

  “Nothing but.”

  I was regretting now not keeping up on the town gossip. I could see I had more research to do. “Did your brother know Barbara Skaggs?”

  “The porch glider lady?”

  “Yes. In Hound Holler.”

  “My brother knew everyone who wore a skirt. Don’t recognize that name though. He rarely kept a mistress long. His wife chased them away. It was a game they played. I think they both enjoyed it.”

  “Were they swingers?”

  “Bromley certainly was.”

  “Your brother lived out at Camelot?” Camelot Court was the largest and most expensive addition on the east end of Knobby Waters. The houses there had been built in the late eighties. They were marketed to professionals and factory managers who commuted east to Seymour or west to Bedford. The development had a fake pond at the entrance with an equally fake gaggle of geese floating on the pond. The gatehouse, which was really just a storage unit for lawn-care equipment, was shaped like the turret on a castle. When I was growing up, Camelot had been an endless rift of limestone ledges and mud wallows, site of the Weeselpleck family pig farm. Despite the Camelot name, I knew for a fact that neither King Arthur nor Guinevere had ever spent a night there. Porky Pig, maybe.

  Bert cleared his throat. “Bromley has … had … the largest house out there. 175. Mine’s next door, 177.”

  “You know the names of any of your brother’s mistresses?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Read the phone book. Doing that would be about the same as reading his little black book.”

  “He had a little black book?” I always thought that term was just an expression.

  “Prouder of that than his dental degree.”

  “Do you have it?

  He shook his head. “Think he kept it on his cell phone.”

  I glanced over Bert’s shoulder and studied the professional portrait of him and his brother standing back to back, arms crossed, in freshly pressed white dental coats. I wondered what had made Bromley so irresistible. He certainly thought he was a stud muffin. That had probably been enough in a town as sleepy-eyed as Knobby Waters. People ran off with each other all the time, mostly hoping to escape the boredom. Just this past winter, on Valentine’s Day, three-hundred-pound Shirley Hill, the bookmobile librarian, and four-foot-tall Peanut Gilstrap, the sweep-up guy at Pokey’s Tavern, stole Shirley’s husband’s Harley and roared away together. No one saw that coming, least of all Shirley’s husband, Owen. He made the state police put out an APB on the Harley. When they asked about Shirley, and if he wanted to put out a protective order on her in case she’d been kidnapped, he said, “Hell no. I want that Harley back. The wife’s on her own.”

  Bert stood up. “You want a cleaning while you’re here, Ruby Jane? On the house, seeing as how you’re helping Mom out, and all.”

  “I’ll call,” I promised, hightailing it out of the office.

  It was lunchtime, so I loped on home. I found leftover deer chili in the refrigerator. I found Sassy sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room. She was wearing a silver lamé mini dress and gold lamé gladiator-style sandals that laced up to her knees. Her hair was teased and held up in a Grecian style gold-toned headband adorned with tiny olive leaves. She was sucking on a Camel Non-Filter cigarette. On the floor in front of her was a metal ashtray shaped like Elvis in his heyday. Also, stacks and stacks of Knobby Waters high school yearbooks.

  I waved away the smoke. I’d grown up locked in cars and houses and PTA meetings with everybody puffing, and I was still alive. I wasn’t going to get my undies in a bunch about the health dangers of secondhand smoke this late in the game.

  “What in tarnation are you doing?” I asked Sassy as I plopped down on the couch with a mug of deer chili. I’d sprinkled Velveeta over the deer chili and was waiting for the cheese skim to cool so I didn’t burn my mouth. I had a cold bottle of Big Red soda pop to wash it all down.

  Sassy pointed to the 1967 yearbook. Next to it was a green spiral stenographer’s notebook that dated back to when we all took high school shorthand together. “Making my senior hottie list, sugar. Need your help.”

  “For?” I blew across the top of my chili mug. The Velveeta quivered like pudding skim. It was cooling nicely.

  “Dating, silly. Miss Sassy is back in the game. I’ve been lonely as a heartbroken hen ever since Melvin got called back to DC for work. Hoping to find a local who has a bit of spit and shine to them. Can’t everybody in Pawpaw County be a hillbilly.”

  Melvin Beal had been Sassy’s last man. He was a right nice gentleman from Louisville she’d lured up to Knobby Waters after she lip-locked him at a VFW shindig on the Bell of Louisville river boat. I had half a mind to point out to Sassy that she was born and raised in the hills just like the rest of us, but I needed Sassy’s extra forty bucks a week in rent to buy tires for the Impala. Dickie, who had just retired from the Lube It Up, had done the Chevy’s last state inspection. He’d looked the other way when it came to my tires. They were balder than Kojak. Now that Dickie was retired, I was bound to get Spike Hill, that grumpy young idiot with the fishing hooks pierced through his lips, at my next inspection. Without Veenie to sweeten the deal by flirting with Dickie, I’d be needing four new tires, God knows what else, just to keep the Impala street legal.

  Veenie strolled into the room carrying an orange plastic bag from the Hoosier Feedbag’s deli department. She pulled out two quart containers that looked to hold ground pink meat sprinkled with chunks of white fat. “Ham salad. Twofer,” Veenie explained when she saw me studying the container.

  Ham salad never went on sale, except on the Fourth of July, so this was a real score.

  Sassy had a package of black dot stickers and was turning the pages of the yearbook. She looked up and waved at Veenie.

  I explained. “Sassy is trolling old yearbooks for dates.”

  Sassy flipped open the notebook. “Let’s start with the live ones.”

  “You always did have high standards,” Veenie said as she scooted back to the kitchen to make herself a ham salad sandwich.

  Sassy asked me to point out who was deceased in our graduating class. She then placed a black dot sticker on the foreheads of each of the dearly departed. When she was done, it looked like most all the men in our class had converted to Hinduism.

  “Dear Lord, these here all that’s left?” Sassy sounded disappointed, like she’d arrived too late at what she’d hoped would be a promising yard sale.

  Six men were still aboveground and upright in the class of 1967. Dickie Freeman (“spoken for,” squeaked Veenie from the kitchen.), Boots Gibson (“still crushing on RJ,” Veenie advised), and Bernie “Twinkles” Tatlock, (gay and married to a short-haul truck driver from Tennessee, explained me and Veenie simultaneously). Number four, Tubby Thomas, was career Navy and rumored to be living in a retirement nudist commune in Pensacola, Florida with three wives.

  Number five, Petey Newkirk, was the best looking of the bunch, with wavy hair and Kirk Douglas dimples. Rumor had it he was doing time for robbing pop machines outside convenience stores around Chicago. He was cute all right but like all the Newkirk men he had dog kibble for brains.

  “He ever rob anything bigger than a pop machine?” asked Sassy.

  “Nope,” I said. “Started at the bottom and stayed there.”

  Sassy slapped a black dot on Petey’s forehead.

  Only the sixth man, Bruce “Fussy” Jones, a local contractor, was single. Better yet, he was recently divorced and owned the prime show house in Camelot Court. Also, as the contractor who built the Leisure Hills retirement community, he held controlling interest in that project. He drove a shiny new canary yellow Lincoln Continental
and captained a tricked out pontoon boat that all the men lusted over out at the White River Boat and Gun Club.

  “He have health issues?” asked Sassy.

  Veenie took a hit off my Big Red to help her swallow a hunk of ham salad. “He can walk. He can talk.”

  “Still drive at night? I like for a man to pick me up. Take me out to eat. I don’t want to be racing around with some sour old pickle in a wheelchair rushing to hit all the early bird buffets.”

  “Sure, he drives all hours,” I said. “I’ve seen him whizzing by here in the evenings on his way to the Boat and Gun Club. He’s the Lord High Admiral.” In a bigger place, The White River Boat and Gun Club might have passed for a yacht club. In Knobby Waters, being a small river town, you didn’t need both a boat and a gun to join, either would suffice, but most respectable members had both. And any fool who aspired to a position of leadership mounted a motor on their boat. Fussy’s pontoon boat was top drawer. He had a power harpoon rig mounted on the bow for gigging at carp, gar, buffalo, and shad. The pontoon also had a little metal shack where Fussy kept a mess of high-powered BBQ equipment. All that glitz pretty much insured him the lead spot in the annual White River regatta.

  Sassy’s face lit up. “He got a girl?”

  Veenie and I exchanged glances. “Nope,” I said. “Nope, don’t believe he has one of those.” What we didn’t tell Sassy was that Fussy Jones was rumored to have a few other issues when it came to women, but heh, that was unsubstantiated gossip. We were all adults. Anyone with an ounce of brains might have figured out in advance that a couple nicknamed Sassy and Fussy were destined to have some hair-tearing issues.

  Veenie and I left Sassy to plot out her manhunt, and after finishing our lunch and gassing up the Impala, squealed on over to Camelot Court to interrogate Bromley Apple’s widow.

  Chapter Seven

  It was late afternoon before Veenie and I arrived at Bromley’s house in Camelot Court. We were hoping to catch Bromley’s wife, Gretal Apple, unawares. Being Bromley’s wife, and a disgruntled one at that according to Bert, we were hoping she might have the lowdown on who might have sent her husband into an early retirement. If Bert were to be believed, the list of suspects might be longer than our life expectancy.