Baby Daddy Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  Pappy didn’t mind being “a man of Leisure” as they called the residents. They gave him biscuits and gravy for breakfast, fried chicken for lunch, pork chops for supper, and a new tub of chaw every Friday night. All that was fine and dandy with him. As far as he was concerned, he’d died and gone to heaven.

  Veenie and I entered the lobby to find it crammed with old ladies in floppy straw sun hats and baseball caps engaged in a heated euchre tournament. The loud speaker system was playing the Statler Brothers. Everybody threw us a wave as we loped back along the hallway toward Pappy’s place. We headed to the back, then out onto an interior brick patio where Pappy was usually parked this time of day.

  Pappy was sitting in his motorized chair when we arrived. He had been a decent enough looking fellow back in the day, but age and hard living had sucked him down into himself like a lump of warm mashed potatoes. The aides wheeled him onto the patio every day to get some Vitamin D, whether he wanted it or not. Mostly he did not. He preferred to sit in the dark and watch Mr. Ed reruns on his portable Zenith.

  It was a bright and sunny day. When we arrived, they’d left him out in a puddle of sunshine on the patio next to a bed of purple petunias. The petunias were arranged in circular patterns inside a pair of old tractor tires that the Ladies of Leisure, the retirement village’s ladies auxiliary, had slop-washed white.

  He tossed his aluminum grab-it stick in the air in a one-handed hello as we approached. He wore yellow Crocs and knee-high wool argyle socks pulled up over the legs of his overalls. He wore a red woolen shirt under all that. He’d stretched a red Indiana University sock cap over his head to block out the sun, as he did every morning. The top of the hat was pointy, making him look like a garden gnome. He looked perfectly sane and normal to us.

  “Them there nurses are trying to boil my brains,” he complained as we reached his scooter.

  “You misbehaving, Pappy?” Veenie asked.

  “Them idiots stole my horses,” he sniffled.

  “You don’t have no horses.”

  He spat chaw into a Mountain Dew can. “I know. They took ‘em.”

  Oh boy. This could go on for hours. Veenie asked him what year it was.

  He ignored her and started cleaning out his ears with a bobby pin. A large, yellow hairy glob popped out of one ear canal.

  I said, “He might be digging out more than ear wax.”

  Veenie squatted down and peered into his ears, then his eyes. She took her thumb and finger and spread open the lids, which drooped, exhausted with age. “What year is it Pappy? You know the year?”

  “1947,” said Pappy.

  “Close enough,” Veenie said. She patted his speckled hand.

  The head day nurse, Mrs. Pruitt, came out looking all prim and proper in her peach nursing outfit and marshmallow shoes. “He’s been addled like that since breakfast.”

  “What’d you feed him?” Veenie asked.

  “We didn’t do this,” huffed Nurse Pruitt.

  Veenie shrugged. “Seems ok to me. Normal as he ever was.”

  The nurse objected. “He thinks it’s 1947.”

  “Lucky him,” Veenie said. “He’s gonna be real excited when you wheel him in and he discovers color TV and air conditioning.”

  I watched a kid with a nose ring, his shoes untied with tongues gagging out, slink by at the edge of the patio. It was a Sneed. I’d know a Sneed anywhere. That whole bunch had arms so long their knuckles dragged the ground. They had a grandmother, Sally Sneed, in Leisure Hills, who roomed across the hall from Pappy. She was a notorious bingo shark and heartbreaker. She and Pappy had done the dance with no pants in the petunia beds last Fourth of July. They both claimed they’d been sleepwalking. Blamed it on the meds. Veenie and I both thanked Jesus that she wasn’t fertile. The Tuttle gene pool didn’t need even a whiff of Sneed dumped into it.

  Veenie pulled a butterscotch candy out of her pocket. She unwrapped it and popped it into Pappy’s mouth. “Sugar might be a little low.”

  Pappy brightened a bit. His head popped out of his lumpy mashed potato torso. “Why you here, Lavinia?” he asked. He looked around like maybe he’d been caught doing something. “It Saturday?” On Saturdays, Veenie often took him out to the covered bridge fishing. Mostly they spun around in circles in a rowboat in the muddy water catching cat tails. Neither of them could cast worth dog crap, but they both enjoyed the father-daughter time.

  Veenie patted Pappy’s hand. “Your mind was sliding around.”

  “Shoot. My mind is fine. Rest of me is a mess. Wheel me back in before the buzzards get me.”

  He meant the turkey buzzards. There was a family of them living in the big sycamore trees along the river behind Leisure Hills.

  “Okeydokey,” said Veenie.

  Chapter Nine

  Avonelle called several times demanding updates. I was embarrassed to confess that Veenie and I were spinning our muddy mental tires. We’d been talking to people all week, waddling around in circles getting nowhere, like thick-headed possums. No one knew anything about Bromley or old William and his affair with Barbara. The whole town had a bad case of zip lip.

  “You know anything about a thousand dollar check Bromley wrote to Barbara the week before he died?” I asked Avonelle. “You got any idea why Bromley wrote that check? What business Bromley might have had with Barbara?

  “Lord no,” she said.

  It occurred to both of us at the same time that maybe Barbara had been squeezing the lemon at both ends, so to speak. “Maybe she was blackmailing Bromley, threatening to get chatty about his stepsiblings if he didn’t cough up support money.”

  “Well, her kind has been known to do that sort of thing,” reasoned Avonelle. “But then why did she write me asking for money straight out? Why not just take my son’s money and be gone?”

  “Got me. Doesn’t sound right that she’d be sneaking around threatening to dirty the Apple family name while also asking you for legal support money.”

  I heard Avonelle sigh deeply. “Honestly, if William or Bromley were here right now, I’d whack them both up the side of the head with my purse.”

  I knew that feeling. I reckoned every woman did.

  “I’m going to talk to Barbara again,” I offered.

  “Keep me posted. But let’s get this wrapped up. I want to clear Bromley’s name. The family doesn’t need more gossip floating around town.”

  By the time I steered the Chevy toward the Pancake Palace, it was late afternoon. Only one car was in the parking lot, a white SUV with Illinois plates. I got a prime parking space up by the front door. Barbara was standing at the hostess podium when I came in the door. She was wearing a big plastic corsage shaped like an orange tiger lily with a banner that read, “Ask me about our waffle and wieners early bird extravaganza.”

  I was well acquainted with their waffles. Barbara, I knew, was well acquainted with the wieners of Knobby Waters. Being me, and not Veenie, I kept my clapper shut.

  Barbara’s face tightened when she saw me. “Booth or counter?” she asked politely.

  “Booth,” I said. Everybody always said the same thing, don’t know why she bothered asking.

  I followed her to an orange booth and listened while she gave me the ten-cent tour of the daily specials. I ordered a bottomless pot of black coffee and a stack of blueberry pancakes. “Can you sit a spell?” I asked as I handed back the menu.

  She looked over her shoulder nervously. No one else was around except for a man at the counter eating some pie. I saw a bearded cook sliding back and forth in the serving window. He wore one of those tall floppy white hats. “Got a break coming up in twenty minutes,” she said. “That do?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  She poured the coffee and was back in a jiffy with my pancakes. They floated in a puddle of purple simple syrup. Not a blueberry in sight. I didn’t know why people thought the twenty-first century was so dang blasted wonderful. Last century you could buy an entire breakfast for a quarter, and they gave y
ou real blueberries to boot.

  Barbara kept her word. She scooted into the booth across from me as I was enjoying my third cup of coffee. I got to the point quickly since she was at work and I was old enough to respect things like that. “If you didn’t know Bromley, why’d he give you a thousand dollars the week before he died?”

  Her eyes widened, like a polecat caught raiding the trash. She fingered her corsage, trying to get it a little straighter. “Okay, look,” she fessed up, “maybe I did know him. A little bit.”

  “You were lovers?”

  “God, no. Oh dear Jesus, no. What kind of jezebel you take me for? I’d never cheat on William like that. Me and him, we were in love.”

  It seemed odd to me that a woman who’d been sleeping with a married man would react so hotly to an accusation of cheating, but hey, morals were slippery little minnows. “So what was the thousand dollars he gave you about?”

  She leaned back in the booth and chewed on her little fingernail. “I never cashed that check. You check with Bromley’s bank. I never did nothing with that check. Still have it in my purse.” She rose to get her purse.

  I laid my hand on hers. “No matter. I believe you, but what was the money for?”

  “He didn’t want his mama to find out about William’s children, his stepkin. I didn’t ask him for that money. He knew about me and William. After William passed, he was afraid his mama would find out about me. He wanted me to move out of town. Claimed I made the family look bad. Me. After all his whoring—excuse my French—around town, he was afraid I might make the Apple family look like common trash.”

  “You turned his money down?”

  “Course I did.”

  “Out of pride?”

  “No. It was more because … well, how far was a thousand dollars going to get me? I didn’t think it was a fair and right offer. I mean, I have to raise them three kids. That’ll take a sight more than a thousand dollars.” She checked her wristwatch. “Dinner trade will be parading in shortly. I got to wheel out the mini-pancake machine. The Baptist Ladies Missionary Society comes in promptly at four. They’re addicted to the early bird wieners and beans. They get cantankerous if their wieners aren’t warmed up just right.”

  “Wait,” I said, “did you ask Bromley for more money?”

  “Course not. I’m not looking to pull up roots and leave town. Took me almost ten years to work my way up at the Pancake Palace. I get medical. I get ten days paid vacation. No weekends or overnights. Where else am I going to get a deal like that?”

  “Did he offer you more money?”

  I heard the bell over the door buzz. Mabel Hudsucker and her party of Baptist soul saviors crowded into the foyer. They were carrying their Sunday purses and clucking like Rhode Island Reds.

  “Yes,” said Barbara. “He kept pestering me. He offered to set me up in my own little apartment out in California somewhere, but like I said, I wasn’t interested. All my kin are close by, down in Washington County. I want my boys knowing my family, since Avonelle don’t seem in no hurry to add extra pages to her family album.”

  “Did you talk to Bromley the morning he died?”

  “No,” she said. “Like I told you and that sheriff, I have no idea why he was on my porch. Reckon he came back to try and persuade me to move on for his mama’s sake. But I never saw him or touched him that morning. And I didn’t take his filthy hush money either.”

  Mabel and her hens were beelining it to the back curved corner booth. Barbara had to scuttle to keep up. She scooped up an armful of menus and a fresh pot of coffee. She was flinging menus right and left by the time I left the place.

  Chapter Ten

  I was at the office poking at the computer, checking databases for financial information on Bromley. Gretal had said he was in debt up to his floppy ears. What I was finding online screamed the same. Greed and lust had been dragging people kicking and screaming to an early grave ever since the good Lord shouted, “Let there be light.” Bromley had been abundantly blessed on both counts. If money had been the motive behind Bromley’s early demise, it surely wasn’t his wife, Gretal, who’d offed him. She told the God’s honest truth when she told me and Veenie that all she stood to inherit was debt. Heaps of it, I’d come to discover.

  While mulling over who’d have motive to see Bromley strap on his angel wings early, I decided to ring the coroner, see if she had a cause of death or other interesting tidbits on Bromley from the autopsy yet.

  April answered right away, but she sounded a little out of breath, distracted. “I was just getting ready to hop on over to the funeral home, take the official paperwork. Meet me there?”

  “In a jiffy,” I said.

  I bumped into Veenie on my way out the door as I locked up the office. She’d been down the street at the VFW catching up on the local scuttlebutt. Well, I called it scuttlebutt, but Veenie called it “intelligence gathering” now that we were paid professional snoops. Chin wagging at the VFW was one of Veenie’s favorite professional activities. Also, just about her only form of exercise.

  “Learn anything important?” I asked.

  “Sure did.” Veenie’s tiny blue eyes were twinkling.

  “Let me have it.”

  “Nurse Pruitt, you remember her?”

  “Ada Pruitt? Pappy’s nurse from out at Leisure Hills? Married to Jimmy, who farms over around Fort Ritner, couple of years behind me in school?”

  “Yeah, her. Well, anyway, besides working out at Leisure Hills, she works here in town, part time for Doc Scarborough. Sees a lot of town folks right regular. She claims Bromley came into the doc’s more than once with one of them sexual diseases. John-Or-Rhea, I think it was.”

  “You mean gonorrhea?”

  “Something like that.”

  “She have any idea who he got it from?”

  “Well, he was supposed to draw up a list of his partners and all for the public health folks, but he claimed his wife, Gretal, was the one and only, and then he slipped Nurse Pruitt a gift card for two free porcelain crowns. And then the VD report paperwork accidently got lost somewhere in her wastebasket.”

  “You reckon that’s important?”

  “Could be. If some fellow gave me crotch critters, I’d be mad enough to take a swing at him.”

  Veenie was right. Love spats and money problems were the top motives for murder. I filled Veenie in on Bromley’s dire financial situation.

  “Bromley being in debt don’t surprise me none,” said Veenie. “The high and mighty are often the same ones ain’t got a pot to piss in. You still think Barbara ain’t involved in all this?”

  I told Veenie about my meeting with Barbara out at the Pancake Palace and how Bromley had tried to pay her off to disappear to California, taking the kids with her.

  Veenie shook her head. “You believe her?”

  “Think so. What she said rang true to me.”

  “And she’s got no idea why Bromley was found dead at her place in that scarecrow getup?”

  “Not a clue. Look,” I said, changing the subject to a more hopeful possibility, “I’m going over to the funeral parlor to see April. She’s got the results of Bromley’s autopsy, and she sounded excited about it.”

  I didn’t have to ask Veenie if she wanted to tag along.

  It was lunchtime by the time I swung the Impala into the gravel parking lot behind the Reddy Funeral Home. Locals knew the name wasn’t pronounced “ready,” but “reedy,” as in Moses and the bull rush reeds, but derelicts had fun with the name anyway. At present, some smartass had marked up the sign in the back to read “Reddy—OR NOT—Funeral Home.”

  April’s white coroner van was pulled tight to the back entrance. There was a green-striped awning over that entrance and a cement rolling ramp so ambulances could pull up and unload the dearly departed without the body getting all wet or covered with foul weather. I thought it was a nice touch.

  Reddy Funeral Home had been doing send-offs for Knobby Waters residents for close to a hundred
years. The Reddy family still owned the enterprise. Beryl Reddy III arranged the services and comforted the families, as did his pappy and grandpappy before him. Like all businesses, they had diversified to keep up with the times. They offered cremations, and green funerals. If you went green they’d tie you up in the root ball of a tree and plant you just about anywhere you might care to take your eternal slumber.

  Most folks in Knobby Waters preferred to be stuffed and displayed the old-fashioned way. The White River Cemetery was dotted with Waskoms and Reynoldses. I was pretty much planning on it being my eternal bedroom. I kind of liked the idea of having familiar neighbors in the Holy Hereafter.

  Veenie, who loved a great send off, was wondering what method of burial Bromley had chosen. “If Gretal’s right about Bromley’s debts, Avonelle will be paying for the services. I reckon she’ll go traditional. On the other hand, I heard tell being roasted is a heck of a lot cheaper. Whole town knows Avonelle is so tight she squeaks when she walks.”

  “But it would look mighty bad,” I mused, “penny pinching on a family funeral, for your prized son to boot. And you know how Avonelle is about appearances.”

  Curious to see how Avonelle might have resolved her dilemma, Veenie and I scurried in the back door of the parlor in search of April. We didn’t find April, but we did run into Bernie Tatlock, who worked as the Reddy cosmetician, gussying up the dearly departed, getting them presentable for their last big public to-do.

  Bernie was the youngest of the Tatlock boys. His oldest brother, Pokey, owned the tavern and pool hall, while his mother, Dolly, was the chief cook at the same. Most folks referred to Bernie, the baby Tatlock boy, as Twinkles Tatlock. If you ever saw him straight on, you’d not have to ask why.