Arly Hanks - O Little Town of Maggody Part 12

"We? You don't think I'm going back into that jungle, do you? Bernie Allen saw a snake, and--"

"Tell you what, Harve," I said as she continued to describe the ordeal, "you give me a ring when the body's been brought back to civilization and I'll see if I can find Dahlia. In the meantime, I've already got my body."

"He has a beard," Bernie Allen announced through a poorly masticated mouthful of chocolate and caramel. "My Uncle Bootie had a beard, too. He got killed by a bus."

Sobbing, the woman crumpled to the ground. Bernie Allen wadded up a candy wrapper and tossed it at her. Harve folded his arms and stared at me.

Ruby Bee and Estelle stood on the flagstone patio in back of the Wockermann house. The guides had left as soon as they'd been questioned, and Billy d.i.c.k had been paid off to drive Dahlia's squeaky-clean granny back to the county home. Now that just the two of them were lingering, the house seemed empty and kinda spooky, and not much warmer than outside.

"I reckon he's even more handsome in person," Estelle said, her hands buried in the pockets of her heavy sweater. She squinted at the clouds, wondering when it would rain. There were still some slivers of broken gla.s.s underfoot that must have been overlooked during the cleanup, but a heavy rain would wash them away. The last thing she wanted to do was drag out the broom and the dustpan.

"But he looks older," Ruby Bee said. "They do something to the photographs so you can't see all those little fine wrinkles around his eyes. Maybe you couldn't find his birth certificate at the courthouse because he's older than the magazine claimed. You were looking in the wrong year."

Estelle was too dispirited to get riled up. "He's got a few gray hairs, too. But I still say he's more handsome in person. When he grinned at me, I felt like I was sixteen and had just been kissed for the first time. I had to go into the kitchen and drink a gla.s.s of water before I dared so much as glance in his direction."

"He glanced plenty of times in Miss Katie Hawk's direction. She's a cold thing, and I'm beginning to regret naming the chicken 'n dumpling special after her. I may just scratch it out on the menu."

"Think how she'd feel if she found out," gasped Estelle, her eyebrows disappearing under the row of rigid ringlets on her forehead.

"Oh, I suppose I'll leave it as long as they're in town, but I don't know what to make of her." She was going to expound, but a movement way across the pasture caught her attention. "Down there by the chicken houses. You see something?"

"I see chicken houses."

"Behind the one that's not burned down. I distinctly saw something."

"If you distinctly saw it, you ought to know what it is."

Ruby Bee wished she had her bifocals in her coat pocket, even though she never wore them in front of Estelle. But even without them, she knew dam well she'd distinctly seen something. "What'd you think about Dahlia's claim that she murdered a man and put the body down there?" she asked.

"I thought it was time for her to get her batteries checked. Arly went in there to see for herself. Are you saying that just because Arly couldn't find Adele, she can't even find a corpse in a chicken house?"

"No," Ruby Bee said, still looking across the pasture at the dim outlines of the two structures, one a mess of charred timbers and the other more substantial. "So Raz bought that parcel of land a few years back, did he? Why would he do that? It's clear on the opposite side of town from his place, and the land ain't good for anything but making mud pies in the spring."

Estelle stamped her feet to keep them warm. "I don't pretend I can explain Raz Buchanon's behavior. Dahlia's, either. Maybe they're getting their drinking water from the same spring. That'd account for Kevin's having an affair with a Farberville floozy. Everybody up that way, including Marjorie, is acting downright peculiar."

"I don't think we ought to dismiss Dahlia's story as a fairy tale. Lottie said that Eula said there was a man in the supermarket yesterday evening that was quizzing her like a game-show host. She ended up drawing him a map so he could find their house. Dead men don't wake up in the middle of the night and go home any more than Raz Buchanon throws away money on property he's got no use for. We ought to go down there and see what he's up to."

"And get our heads blown off, Miss Purple Heart?"

"We're not gonna get our heads blown off if he's not there," Ruby Bee said with a smug smile. "And I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts he won't be there at midnight."

Chapter Fifteen.

Miss Vetchling went to the front door of the small frame house and rang the bell. Inside, a dog started barking and she had to wait several minutes before the door opened a scant inch. "Yes?" the woman said, wincing as something clattered behind her.

"I'm the regional supervisor of the Vacu-Pro Home Cleaning Systems, Mrs. Borland. We're doing a survey. Could I take just a minute of your time to ask a few questions concerning the Vacu-Pro demonstration conducted in your home approximately two weeks ago?"

"Some boy came to the house, but I'd forgotten that the baby had a doctor's appointment. I told him to call back later but he didn't. I forgot about it until now."

"Thank you." Miss Vetchling made a check next to the first name on the list. "Would you like to schedule an appointment in the future with one of our salesmen?"

"Is it true the vacuum cleaners cost seven hundred dollars?"

"Seven hundred fifty-three dollars, plus shipping and handling."

"We got a lot of doctor's appointments coming up," Mrs. Borland said as she closed the door.

Miss Vetchling returned to the curb, got in her car and consulted the street map, and then drove off toward the second of Kevin Buchanon's appointments on what she had awarded the sobriquet of "His Fateful Day."

Ten seconds later a car pulled away from the curb and followed her at a distance carefully calculated not to arouse her suspicion.

"This one is all yours," I said to Harve, allowing myself the pleasure of chortling as we trudged along the path back to the a.s.sembly Hall. "He's just a tourist who stumbled and fell into the official Baptism Pool. What a shame little Bernie Allen upchucked all over what evidence there might have been."

Harve gazed disapprovingly at me. "Carlos L. Tunnato of Chattanooga might not find it all that funny."

"Everybody would be a sight healthier if the hometown boy had chosen another hometown. Adele would be at the county home, stringing cranberries, and Patty May would be threading the needle for her." I tore a branch off a bush and stripped it of its leaves. "Mrs. Jim Bob was bawling about all the money she invested in souvenirs. Eula and Elsie are likely to be in bad shape, not to mention Ruby Bee and her shelves of c.r.a.p. Brother Verber has taken to dressing up as if he ought to be leading a pony at a birthday party. We should have yanked up all the ..."

"All the what?" Harve muttered, not sounding all that eager to find out.

I was so overwhelmed with my theory that I had to sit down on a rock and wait for the adrenaline to ebb. "The town limits signs. The county survey map may lay out the town to the last foot, but n.o.body's going to get a tape measure and argue with the sign. That sly ol' geezer ..."

"Which sly ol' geezer are you getting so rapturous about?"

"Raz," I said. "He thinks that, as long as those chicken houses are outside the town limits, I won't take an interest in them. Maybe he thinks they're outside my jurisdiction. h.e.l.l, they may be, but so's Cotter's Ridge. Surely he's aware that I've been up there on countless occasions to look for his still. s.h.i.t, I've told him so."

Harve pulled me to my feet and said, "We need to keep going. We've got a corpse back at the creek that needs to be moved before dark." He gallantly held back a spindly bush for me, then let it whip past and nudged me into step. "Are you saying Raz has his still in the chicken house?"

"No, he wouldn't risk that. But it's getting near the holiday season, and he may have decided to use the chicken house as a warehouse. I wouldn't be surprised if on certain nights there were cases covered with tarps in there. No wonder he was p.i.s.sed when the sign was moved."

"The sign was moved?" Harve said blankly.

"Because the Wockermann house was not within the town limits," I said, so pleased with my deductions that I was waving my arms at Harve and walking backward while I elaborated. This is not always wise in the woods, and only his split-second grab saved me from sprawling over a log. "The Homecoming Committee decided to redefine the boundaries of the town so that they could claim Matt was born in MagG.o.dy. Don't you love it? Other towns go through an arduous process to annex adjoining land, but we just get our shovels and do it in the middle of the night."

Harve was looking confused, understandable in that I hadn't gotten around to mentioning the midnight stalkings. After I explained, he said, "All right, but what does that have to do with the bodies that keep turning up--or not turning up?"

"How should I know? I was merely solving one minor puzzle, not auditioning for a role on Mystery. As soon as the Nashville people are gone and things quiet down, I'm going to stake out the chicken house and nab Raz with a truckload of moonshine--and not even Marjorie the Wonder Pig can save him."

"I'm sure you'll get a letter of commendation from the revenuers. I'm gonna wait here for McBeen and the boys. I don't suppose you want to go over to this guy's motel room in Farberville and poke around?"

"Sorry, Harve," I said, not even making an effort to sound sincere. I left him in front of the a.s.sembly Hall and walked back to my car in front of the souvenir shoppe. The tablecloth across the window reminded me of how Pierce Keswick had looked when he'd been found, hunched over the guitar, his hands tied in place, the wig hanging over his face. I sat down on the hood of the car and for the first time asked the glaring question: Why?

To implicate Matt? It hadn't, thus far, or anybody else (Darla Jean did not qualify as a suspect). I muddled for a long while, almost able to make a connection but unable to bring it into focus. First there was Matt, then the mannequin dressed to look like Matt, then Keswick dressed to look like the mannequin dressed to look like Matt. Except, of course, Matt Montana was a package designed and produced in Nashville.

I finally gave up the antediluvian issue of man versus mannequin and returned to a more concrete realm. It seemed likely that Pierce Keswick had come to MagG.o.dy as a result of one of two telephone calls. I wanted to talk to Katie Hawk about hers--which she'd failed to mention earlier. But first I decided to talk to Lillian Figg and find out in more detail what she and Pierce Keswick had said to each other. And swing by the Dairee Dee-Lishus on the way to the motel parking lot. Country music fans may survive on a diet of broken promises and harrowingly bad puns, but I thought I'd squeeze in a corndog and a cherry limeade.

Twenty minutes later I tapped on the door of the bus and was admitted with a sinister hydraulic hiss. Lillian suggested we sit at one of the tables in the middle of the bus, explaining Matt was in the shower and liable to pop out into the back room without so much as a towel. Modesty, she'd added with a small shrug, was not among his talents. She offered me a cup of coffee and, when I declined, sat down across from me. Her eyes were red and her eyelids swollen, but she'd repaired her lipstick since I'd last seen her in the Wockermann living room.

"I still can't believe it," she said. "Pierce and I met a good twenty years ago, when we both were so d.a.m.ned determined that we thought we'd invented the word." She rubbed her face hard enough to peel off a layer of skin. "I don't know if I'm gonna get by without that son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"Tell me about Country Connections."

"Fifteen years ago, give or take, Pierce and Ripley inherited everything from their parents. Pierce was the executor, naturally, and he bullied Ripley into selling the house and the farmland in the delta and investing the whole bundle in a seedy little label company that was about to sink into obscurity. It's not exactly a major force in Nashville these days, but it's respectable. Pierce puts in eighteen hours a day, and his reputation for honesty is a rare thing in the business. Was, I guess." She knotted her fingers and looked away.

"Why did you say that Pierce bullied Ripley into investing in the company?"

"You've met Ripley, right? He claims that back then he was lost in such rigorous and demanding intellectual pursuits that he had no time to read the legal papers Pierce shoved under his nose. He was crawling around yards in northeast Mississippi in search of botanical specimens and pallid young southern intellectuals." She caught my questioning look and shrugged. "I don't think so. His kind are so obsessed with a.n.a.lyzing literary pa.s.sion that they're too exhausted to indulge in it themselves. I find them curiously as.e.xual."

"Quite a contrast with what you've told me about Pierce," I said impa.s.sively.

"Pierce spent his childhood fishing and hunting. Ripley used to go to the attic, dig old clothes out of trunks, and reenact scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire to entertain his mother's bridge club."

My expression slipped just a tad. "It's hard to see him as Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the stone age."

"Try Blanche DuBois, depending on the kindness of strangers," Lillian said drily. "Pierce left when he finished high school, joined the army, and ended up in Nashville. G.o.d, it's gonna be a lonely town without him. He held my hand at funerals and kept me company during my lowbudget divorce. You ever been divorced?"

I nodded, surprised. "Yes, once."

"Take my advice and hire a lawyer to make sure everything was filed properly, notarized ..." She looked over my shoulder. "Arly was asking me about Pierce."

Matt wore a terry-cloth robe, although it was belted loosely and most of his chest was exposed. He sat down across from us and propped his bare feet on the back of the seat. This exposed enough to give his most tepid fan a stroke.

"Lillian and Pierce," he chanted in a cruel parody of the schoolyard rhyme, "sitting in a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G; first comes the contract, then comes the screw, and now they're f.u.c.kin' Matt and Katie, too."

Lillian winced. "Why don't you get back in the shower and turn it on cold?"

"Aw, I was just joking. I owe everything I have to you and Pierce. You discovered me, and he was generous enough to offer me an exclusive contract that'll keep me tied up for four and a half more years. I know Katie's grateful, too, now that she's in the same situation."

It was cold outside, but the temperature was plunging in the bus. I'd learned at the police academy that marital disputes were a h.e.l.luva lot more dangerous than armed robberies, ticking bombs, and pit bulls. My experience to date consisted of going out to a rusty trailer at the Pot o' Gold and lecturing two teenagers on how to resolve arguments about her lack of expertise in the kitchen. The only time I'd been in real danger was when she'd tried to get me to taste the chili.

"That contract was in your best interest," Lillian said defensively. "Your single happened to hit the charts and win the award, but the label company took a big risk when they put up well over a quarter of a million to cut the new Christmas alb.u.m. Would you have preferred to keep performing at those d.i.n.ky amateur-night clubs?"

"What I'd prefer," he said, grinning at me, "is to be released from the contract so I can go over to MCA or Arista and make the sort of money a star deserves. I'm stuck not only with p.i.s.sant Country Connections, but also with Lillian here, who's promised to deliver me at the back door of the poorhouse if I'm not a good boy."

"Richer or poorer, till death do us part," Lillian said as she went into the bedroom and closed the door.

"Till death do us part," echoed Matt, licking his lips as if he could taste each word. If Lillian turned up dead in Mrs. Jim Bob's front window, I'd have a good idea where to begin the investigation. I tried to remember what bits of gossip I'd heard from Ruby Bee and Estelle. Katie Hawk's name had been mentioned.

"Does Lillian represent Katie's professional interests, too?" I asked.

Matt spoke more loudly than necessary. "If you wanna call it that. The agency signed her up, arranged for her to cut a few singles at Country Connections, and every now and then they book her at a c.r.a.ppy club. Slavery is alive and well in Nashville."

"How does Pierce's death affect your contract?"

"Depends on what Ripley does, but there's hope. He ain't what you call a true aficionado of country music. I went by his place one night to pick up a press release, and he was listening to a CD with some woman screeching like she was being poked up the b.u.t.t. In Italian, too. I hope he'll sell out to Breed, who'll sell my contract to one of the big companies. Next year I'll be playing in Las Vegas between tours in Europe. When I get tired of that, maybe I'll open myself a country music house up in Branson, Missouri--right between Willie Nelson's and Barbara Mandrell's. I'll have 'em over for supper on Sundays."

"Perhaps you can persuade Auntie Adele to keep house for you," I suggested, watching him carefully.

"She's too old for that. I'll fix her up with an apartment of her own just like Elvis did for his aunt. After all she did for me, I ought to take care of her till the angels take her away--long as they don't take their own sweet time about it."

His consideration for Dahlia's granny was touching. I wondered if he was so egotistical that he hadn't stopped posing for the press long enough to take a hard look at her earlier in the afternoon. "She looks fairly healthy for her age. How old is she, Matt?"

"Old as the hills, I reckon."

"Do you think she's taken a turn for the worse since you were here two years ago?"

"s.h.i.t, I dunno. I just said what they told me to say. I guess she said what they told her to say. I thought the old bag did a better job of acting like Aunt Adele than she would have done herself--if you'd found her."

"Maybe so," I said as I stood up. "When's the last time you spoke to Pierce?"

"I don't know. Couple of days ago in his office, I suppose. He was real fond of lecturing me." Matt grinned at me, possibly because he knew I was floundering like a fish out of water.

"He didn't say anything to indicate he might come to MagG.o.dy?"

"Nope. After he got off his high horse, we reviewed my new alb.u.m. Come Christmas, it's all you're gonna hear on every radio station in the whole d.a.m.n country. Hey, you wanna hear 'The MagG.o.dy Blues'?"

"I don't think so." I went to the door of the part.i.tion and knocked. "Lillian, a couple more questions before I leave you in peace."

She opened the door. "Yes?"

"What time did you speak to Pierce yesterday?"

"He called me at about three," she said. "He wanted to make sure we'd arrived safely and everything was set for the concert. He was going to call today. Guess he won't."

"Did you leave the bus last night?"

"I went for a walk, and then I went to the bar and sat there until it closed. And no, I didn't talk to anybody."

I lowered my voice. "Were you and Pierce ...?"

"He was my best friend, not my lover. Matt has trouble conceptualizing a relationship in which one person's not s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the other physically, emotionally, or financially." She glanced over her shoulder at a chirrupy sound. "Another call, probably from Amy. She's in a dither, and Ripley won't even talk to her."

"Why is Amy calling you?" I asked bluntly, my ignorance of such matters well-established by now. I wasn't overcome with embarra.s.sment; after all, not one of them had my expertise in such matters as following school buses or mediating over chili made with turkey sausage.

"I'm a partner." She shut the door.

Matt had found a bottle of wine and was tippling as I headed for the front of the door. "Some might say," he said, ignoring the red wine that ran down his chin and splattered on his white robe, "that she has a conflict of interest, being my agent and manager on the one hand and a partner in the label company on the other hand. It's sort of like having your hands in both ends of the cookie jar, but I checked with a lawyer and it's legal."

"Where did you go after you left the PD last night?"

"I bought a jar of field whiskey and went up to the place where Katie's staying. I sat below her window, listening to her sing, till my toes froze. I got back here about midnight."

"Can Lillian confirm that?"