I swept the binoculars away from my eyes and handed them to Veenie. “Yeah. He’s just sitting there, working, near as I can tell.”
Veenie whipped off her glasses and slapped the binoculars tight to her eyes. Her vision was going in spots, but she could still see fairly well in bright daylight or with telescopic assistance. “Who’s the high-class doll in his office?”
I squinted. Someone had scooted into his office and was standing in front of Rusty’s desk with her arms crossed. Rusty was looking up at her. Everyone else had left the office now. I pulled the paper Joyce had given me out of the glove compartment and studied the photos of the three women she considered the most likely suspects. “Looks to be Kayleigh Burton.”
Veenie put down the binoculars and studied the photo. “Yeah, that’s her. How old is she?”
“Says here she’s twenty-one. Just graduated IU. Real estate major. An intern.”
I picked up the binoculars and studied the action in the office. Kayleigh was a petite trim woman, but stacked. She had short, dark raven hair with a little natural curl. She was dressed professionally in a shirt-waist silk jacket and skirt with a tight-fitting blouse. She was dripping in gold bling. Definitely attractive. Her hands were off her hips now, and she was pacing back and forth in front of Rusty’s desk. Every now and then she threw her hands up in disgust. Rusty was standing up behind the desk now. He was running his hands through his hair. Then he placed his hands on his hips. His little pooch belly strained against his dress shirt. Kayleigh started shaking her fist at him. He shook his fist at her in return. Rusty’s face turned brick red. Kayleigh ran over to the window in Rusty’s office. Next thing I knew, a forest green venetian blind rolled down and I couldn’t see a dang thing.
Veenie made a sucking sound with her dentures. “Looks like a lover’s spat to me.”
I hated to admit it, for Joyce’s sake, but I had to agree with Veenie. Rusty and Kayleigh were definitely arguing about something. And they’d waited until everyone left the office to light into one other. It was killing me that I couldn’t see anything. Lordy, what I’d have given to hear the conversation inside that office.
Veenie and I waited and watched for an entire hour. It took that long for the lights to go off in Rusty’s private office. As soon as the lights snapped off, Kayleigh strolled out into the main office, grabbed her purse off a desk, and strutted out the main door. Walking briskly, she headed south toward the courthouse square.
Rusty popped out next. He had his jacket on. His tie was snug to his neck. He was all neat, every thin little graying hair in place. He locked the door on his private office then flipped off the outer lights. He strolled out and climbed into his black BMW, the only car left in the gravel lot at the side of his building. He peeled out of the lot and headed toward the main road out of town that led to the subdivision where he and Joyce lived.
Meanwhile, my cell phone was exploding.
Veenie peered at the screen of the phone, laying on the seat between us. “It’s Joyce.”
“I figured as much.”
“You going to answer that?”
I looked down at the messages. A lot of broken hearts. A crying face or two. A sizzling bomb. A woman with a dagger in her back. “Nope.” Right at the moment, things weren’t looking so good for Joyce’s marriage. Knowing how crazy Joyce could get, I wasn’t going off half-cocked. I needed proof, something solid, before I got her all whipped up.
I texted Joyce that everything “seems normal, so far,” and told her that Rusty had been working late at the office but was now headed home.
She texted back praying hands and a dozen happy faces.
Veenie eyed me. “Why you keeping this from her?”
“I’m not keeping anything from that child.”
“What exactly you think they were doing in that office for an hour with the blinds yanked down?”
I chewed my cheek. “I’m not getting Joyce riled up unless we got something solid.”
“Ruby Jane, you know as well as I do that men don’t lock themselves in a room with a hot young piece of chicken and pull the blinds down except for one gosh darn reason.”
“Dang it, Lavinia, we need proof. You know how Joyce gets. We need to tell her the whole story, and we need to get it right. We can’t be going off half-cocked. If she gets riled up, she could end up wiping out half of Monroe County.”
“Reckon you’re right, but how we going to catch ol’ Rusty in the act?”
“I dunno yet. We’ll think of something. Maybe that tracking device will give us some clues. Let’s watch it for a day or two.”
When we’d first arrived, Veenie had gone to the parking lot and slapped a GPS tracker under Rusty’s back bumper. We could now track every move he made in his BMW. If he was sleazing around town bumping uglies with his interns, he almost certainly had a private love nest somewhere. Once we found that love nest, we could close in and get some photos. Joyce would need evidence if she hoped to get a decent divorce settlement. Dang it, she’d invested so much in keeping up her appearance, her marriage, her kids. I just hated to see her little fairy-dusted heart smashed to pieces like this.
“Let’s head home,” I sighed as I keyed the Impala. It was growing dark, and the back roads from Bloomington to Knobby Waters were windy and hilly, not all that well-lit. The old Chevy had coughed and puffed a good bit crawling around the hills on the way to Bloomington. It could get temperamental, and I didn’t want to get stranded out in the countryside.
“Fine by me,” said Veenie. “Can we cruise through the drive-in window at the Bedford Frosty Top? They got a chili dog special on Tuesdays, ten percent off for seniors.” Veenie pulled a coupon out of her bra.
“I thought them chili dogs barked back at you.”
“They do, but so does everything I eat.”
She had a point. Besides, the whole Rusty thing had me depressed, and eating always helped. I cheered up at the thought of a double chili dog with extra mustard barking my name.
Chapter Twenty
The next morning over breakfast, Veenie checked with the bank online to confirm that Sassy’s thousand dollar retainer had cleared the agency’s account. “Lookie there,” she said to me between slurps of corn flakes. She was pointing to her cell phone screen. “Sassy’s check cleared. Reckon we’ll have to spring her now.” She sounded kind of disappointed.
Sassy herself was fuming by the time we got to the jail and picked her up. The judge had voted her an unlikely flight risk and signed her release. She’d have to appear in court for an arraignment, but that was a few days away. And frankly, given what I knew, I didn’t think there’d be enough evidence to indict her. But then again, what did I know? Pretty much zippo.
Sassy slid into the backseat of the Impala and hunkered down low. Glancing in the rearview, I could practically see steam rolling off her hay pile of hair. Her mascara was dripping down her eyes like one of them “Kiss” band guys my son Eddie had idolized since the seventies. Her lips were chapped and cracked like big, dry pawpaw leaves. “Get me home,” she croaked, “before someone sees me looking all natural like this.” She slid down in the backseat and stayed that way until we reached our house.
I felt sorry for her.
Even Veenie softened toward her.
Heck, both of us knew full well that Sassy, for all her faults, was not a murderer.
I fixed her a hot breakfast of eggs and bacon and some home-squeezed OJ once we got home. She wolfed it down, along with a couple of cups of hot coffee sludged up with diet sweetener and powdered cream. I retrieved my notebook from my messenger bag and began asking Sassy questions. I was hoping she had some idea who might have gigged Fussy. She kept shaking her head. “No, no, no.”
“I barely knew the man,” she complained as she blew on her coffee cup, cooling it down. “He was taking me out to steak dinners and promising me cruises on his yacht over at Lake Monroe. Why on earth would I murder the guy?” She’d washed her hair and had it trussed up in a f
lowered towel turban. Her face was slathered with pink cream. She’d swaddled herself in a red silk robe and was wearing her faux diamond stud earrings. Another two hours in front of the mirror, and she’d look like the pert old Sassy again.
“We believe you,” I said. “But it looks kind of bad from the outside, you being the last one to see him and all.”
“Yeah,” said Veenie. “What we need is another suspect. A plan B. We need someone to pin this on, so Grape Nuts will leave you alone.”
“Well,” said Sassy, “I don’t have one iota of an idea who’d want to kill Fussy. We hadn’t even made it to second base yet. I mean, sure, I was upset about the lingerie thing and all, but Lordie, no one kills someone over that. Do they?”
Veenie shrugged. “I might.”
“What about your ex?” I asked. “Boots said he’s out of prison.”
Sassy’s eyes grew big as blue moons. She bit her bottom lip. “Doogie? Doogie Duval? Why, he’s not supposed to be released for another ten years.”
“He wasn’t released. He escaped.” Since talking to Boots, I’d looked up the news online in Terre Haute, where the state prison was. I’d discovered that Doogie had hidden in a laundry cart. He’d left the prison in a wad of dirty bedsheets the week before. They had a statewide APB out on him.
Sassy sucked in a load of air. “He’s out of jail?”
Veenie eyed Sassy. “He dangerous? The jealous type?”
“Lord, he is a bit jealous, but he’d never murder anyone.”
Veenie seemed dubious. “He’s a thief, ain’t he?”
“He’s a con artist,” she objected. “Gentle as a kitten. He don’t kill people. He’s not that kind of man.”
I’d never met the fellow, but Sassy seemed pretty sure of that last point. “You think he’d come looking for you?”
Sassy clutched at her robe and squirmed in her seat. “Maybe. He might.”
“Why’s that?” asked Veenie.
Sassy hemmed and hawed. “Well, truth be told, I might have a wee bit of his money stashed away.”
Veenie clicked her teeth. “That money he stole from all those dim-witted investors with his real estate scheme?”
“Look, I don’t know for sure where that money came from, but it’s mine, fair and square. California is a joint property state.” Sassy was pouting now. She’d finished her coffee and was rinsing the pot in the sink. “If you ladies will excuse me, I got to get my face on. I need to get out and about. Don’t want people talking.”
Veenie snorted. “You’re about sixty years too late for that.”
Sassy stuck out her tongue.
Veenie did the same.
“Oh for Pete’s sake, stop it. Both of you. This here is serious. Sassy could go to prison.” I stared Veenie down. “Also, she’s our client now.”
Veenie made a face but mumbled an apology.
“Before you go, Sassy, is this pretty much what Doogie looks like?” I showed her a couple of photos on my phone that I’d found online in the local news reports. One was his mug shot. In the mug shot he looked like a short, runty, crazy-eyed little guy with a flattop. He looked suave in the other, taken before his prison days at some California fundraiser for his real estate development, Sun City. In that photo, Doogie had his hair combed up on top of his head like a woodpecker. The top was jet-black—obviously a dye job—and the sides were white, all slicked back. He wore overly large, thick-rimmed black glasses, the stylish kind I’d seen movie directors wearing on TV. He wasn’t very tall, but he was all puffed up in an expensive wide-lapel gangster suit.
Sassy pointed to the suave photo. “That’s what he looked like when I was married to him. He didn’t need the glasses, except to read, but he read somewhere that people trusted people who wore glasses, and he wanted people to trust him. Said it was easier to fleece them that way.”
Veenie studied the photo. “Not bad looking. You know he was a crook when you hitched your wagon to him?”
“Lord no, Lavinia. I thought he was rich. Successful. He told me he was from Terre Haute, descended from French royalty. Terre Haute, that’s French you know. In restaurants he always ordered in French. And boy, could that man French kiss.” Sassy got a kind of dreamy look in her wide blue eyes.
I pointed to a news article I’d read on him. “Says here he was born in Terre Haute on the wrong side of the tracks. Says he spent time in the Indiana Boy’s Home for petty crimes.” As far as I could see, the only French Doogie might have been wise to was french fries.
“I don’t know anything about that. Besides we all make mistakes when we’re young. We met at a real estate open house in Canoga Park, California. He looked like a man ought to look to me. I was coasting on a big alimony payout from hubs number three. We hit it off when I offered to pay cash up front for a four-bedroom raised ranch he was showing. He got a kick out of the fact that we were both corn-fed Hoosiers living it up in the big city.”
Veenie wrinkled her nose. “Nothing seemed suspicious about him?”
Sassy shrugged. “Everybody has rough spots. He looked successful to me. And he was a gentleman. He never once modeled my underwear.”
I studied my notes. “So, you reckon he might come looking for you? He might have been watching you? Saw you and Fussy getting all intimate? Got mad? Took a pop at Fussy?”
“He might have. Sure. I mean, he might have challenged Fussy to a fight, but he sure as all heck wouldn’t have killed him.”
Veenie chimed in. “You got his money. I imagine that might have riled him up. If there’s anything a thief hates it’s having his stash stolen.”
I thanked Sassy for all the information. “I’ll see if I can’t talk to Boots, get him thinking more about Doogie being the prime suspect here. We got to give them someone to go after so they leave you alone.”
Sassy slid over and gave me a big hug, then another. I could feel her warm tears mingling with the cold cream on her cheek. She went for Veenie too, but Veenie, who hated to be squeezed on, dashed out onto the porch, out of Sassy’s reach.
“You go on,” I said to Sassy, motioning her down the hallway. “Shoo! Put your face on. Me and Veenie will snoop around. Take care of this thing for you.”
Sassy gave me a final hug before sashaying down the hallway in her silk robe and disappearing into the bathroom.
Chapter Twenty-One
Later that morning, I checked the online dashboard for the GPS tracker Veenie and I had stuck on Rusty’s BMW bumper, only to find that he’d gone nowhere but straight home last night, then straight back to the office this morning. Nothing more we could do to help Joyce until Rusty did something suspicious or stupid.
Veenie texted me that she’d be down at the VFW gathering intelligence for most of the day, so I fired up the Impala and headed downtown by myself to check in with Harry at the office.
Veenie and I were now juggling three open cases. There was Sassy’s murder case, my daughter Joyce’s cheating-heart husband, and Avonelle’s mysterious blackmail case. Might even say we had four cases because I still didn’t believe that Bromley Apple had died of natural causes. I reckoned whatever had happened to him was connected to that blackmail note Avonelle had given us. Until she got another note with more instructions about the twenty thousand, there wasn’t a whole lot more Veenie and I could do to move forward. Still, we were juggling a lot of balls. Truth be told, Veenie and I could have used an extra pair of eyes and hands. I was hoping the boss might see it the same way.
Harry was in the office all dolled up in his three piece suit when I arrived on Monday. His hair was slicked back, fresh out of the shower. His mustache was neatly waxed, and his tie was impeccably tied. Obviously, he’d not done the tying. He always got it a bit cattywampus.
Dottie Reynolds was still hanging out with him, or more accurately, on him. She jumped off his lap when I came in and starting scurrying around the office all pigeon-toed in her pink sparkly hot pants and midriff top. She was wearing dangly, purple feather earrings that hun
g down to her bony shoulders. She’d made Harry a pot of coffee. It looked like she’d also fetched him some morning donuts from the Roadkill Café down the street. He was sitting with his feet up on his desk, sucking on a chocolate sprinkle donut when I shouldered in with the morning mail, mostly bills, but there was a yellow circular for half-off on a gallon of rope bologna at the Hoosier Feedbag. I saved that for Veenie because her daddy, Pappy Tuttle, was a rope bologna fiend.
“You’re late,” Harry whined, gesturing wildly at his wrist watch. Donut crumbs danced on his mustache.
Dottie rushed over and wiped the crumbs away for him. Besides being pigeon-toed, she was also a bit knock-kneed. I don’t know how she ran without tripping all over herself.
I reckoned her husband, Shap, must have been out of town on errands again. I made a mental note not to hang too long at the office. I didn’t want to die in what Veenie referred to as, “an incident of testicular manslaughter” because Harry couldn’t control his Mr. Happy.
“I’m not late,” I insisted as I slapped the mail down on Harry’s desk. “Veenie and I worked late yesterday. We were down at the jail, springing Sassy. Her retainer check cleared the bank. We interviewed her at home. She’s all shook up.”
Harry grunted. “She shouldn’t have gigged ol’ Fussy.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s innocent.”
Harry popped the last of the donut into his mouth and licked his fingertips. “That’s what they all say.”
I explained to Harry that I thought the more likely suspect in Fussy’s murder was Sassy’s ex, Doogie Duval.
Harry tweaked his mustache. “You got any proof he’s even in town?”
“Working on it.” I fired up my computer. I wanted to check the phone databases to see if Doogie had any living relatives close by. Most people relied on family and old friends when it came to hiding out from the law.
Harry sauntered over, hands on hips. He stared at my computer screen. “Where’s Lavinia?”
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