The Merry Wives of Maggody Read online

  “Whattaya want?” he demanded. “Me and Marjorie ain’t got time to stop and pass the time listenin’ to yer whining. I ain’t a mechanic, but iff’n I was, I still wouldn’t waste my time fiddlin’ with yer car. Call somebody what cares.”

  I bit my lip until I could trust myself. “There’s been, uh, an accident. I need you to wait here while I make a call at the PD. As soon as I’m back, you and Marjorie can be on your way.”

  “An accident?” He cackled until tobacco juice dribbled out of his mouth like molasses. “You talkin’ about that feller in the boat behind you? Did he accidentally bash himself on the back of his head?”

  “Okay,” I said, “not an accident. Will you please stay here and keep people away for ten minutes?”

  “Ain’t on my schedule. Marjorie has a hankerin’ for fresh croissants, so we’s headin’ for Farberville afore the storm hits. Only got one windshield wiper, and it don’t work. Mebbe when we git back, I can do you a favor—iff’n you aim to pay me back one of these days.”

  “By not mentioning whatever you have stashed in your barn?”

  “There ain’t nuthin’ in my barn, and don’t you fergit it! Anyone who so much as spits on the door is gonna be right sorry for a long time to come.”

  This does not happen on TV cop shows. I had no idea what time the SuperSaver opened on Sunday mornings, or even if it opened before churches loosed their properly chastised sinners for the day. Mrs. Jim Bob was a big fan of blue laws, no matter how archaic they were. I couldn’t twiddle my thumbs and watch the flies attack until Raz’s pickup rattled back to town.

  “Listen up, Raz,” I said as firmly as I could despite my queasiness. “If you refuse to cooperate, you’re going right to the top of my shit list. You have immunity for that still near Robin’s shack, but that’s all. When I have a minute, I’ll call the ATF and the DEA. I might call the FBI, since you’re involved in interstate trafficking. The SPCA may decide to take away Marjorie. The RCMP will come riding across the pasture, accompanied by a SWAT team. Not only will they seize the contents of your barn, they’ll wreck your house while they search for contraband. They’ll drain your hot tub and dump out your bags of gourmet coffee beans. Could be they’ll stumble over the still themselves, or find a cave filled with jars of moonshine.”

  His eyes slitted. “I reckon I can wait for five minutes, but that’s it. Git yer scrawny butt in action and go make yer damn fool call afore I change my mind!”

  I obliged, although my butt was far from scrawny.

  Harve was less than thrilled when he finally answered his phone. I skipped the pleasantries and told him what had happened. I’m sure he would have responded with a string of obscenities that would have curled my ears had not Mrs. Dorfer been snoring nearby, her face slathered with cold cream and her hair protected by a shower cap. Harve finally grunted a promise to round up his deputies and the medical examiner.

  I returned to the SuperSaver parking lot and sent Raz and Marjorie on their quest for fresh croissants in Farberville. As he drove away, I realized I should have begged him to bring me one. Or two. I walked around the perimeter of the yellow tape. The dusty asphalt was scuffed with prints from shoes, bare feet, sneakers, and boots. The boat was covered with smudged fingerprints. Litter included cigarette butts, Popsicle sticks, candy wrappers, aluminum cans, a flattened orange, and a three-wheeled toy car. None of it looked significant.

  During the next hour, cars filled with gawkers slowed down or attempted to stop. Perkin peered through a mud-splattered windshield. Falutin Buchanon’s brood screamed at me from the back of his pickup; Jeremiah McIlhaney managed not to rear-end them by scant inches. Raz honked at me as he and Marjorie returned from their bakery run. I officiously waved them off as I would gnats. I had less luck when Estelle and Ruby Bee drove up in Estelle’s car. Oblivious to my orders to leave, they walked up to the boat and stared at the body.

  “Mercy me,” Ruby Bee said, her face pale. She clutched a button on her dress to ward off any lingering malevolence. “You see who that is, Estelle?”

  Estelle nodded. “No doubt about it. I figured he was in for a hangover this morning, but this is a sight worse. He was a buffoon, but I kinda liked him.”

  “Because he said you looked like a Greek goddess.”

  “Because he was a nice fellow. I ain’t a pushover for compliments, as you well know. People have been commenting on my bone structure since I was in pigtails and petticoats.” Estelle lowered one shoulder and gave us her version of a sultry smile. “When I was a cocktail singer in Little Rock, one of my regulars called me Aphrodite. She was the goddess of love and beauty.”

  Ruby Bee snickered. “This fellow here was so drunk that he couldn’t tell a hound dog from a nanny goat. I have to admit he wasn’t the worst drunk to set foot in the bar and grill, though. Do you recollect when Botocks Buchanon knocked out her boyfriend on the dance floor? She wasn’t but a hundred pounds, soaking wet. She was still threatening to whack off his pecker with a dull ax when I managed to throw her out. I limped for a week afterward.”

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” I said, “but do you know his name?”

  “Tommy Ridner.” Ruby Bee blotted the corner of her eye with a tissue, as if the victim were a family member. “He checked into the Flamingo on Friday afternoon. I’ve got his home address and credit card information at the bar. Did somebody kill him?”

  Estelle snorted and said, “You don’t think he bashed himself on the back of the head, do you? He’d have to be a contortionist to pull that off, and he sure wasn’t one. He dropped his wallet last night and had a real hard time bending over to pick it up. I was surprised nobody kicked his fanny.”

  “Maybe he fell,” Ruby Bee said, retreating as she noticed the flies. “Somebody heaved him into the boat, and he bled to death.”

  “Somebody with a bulldozer,” Estelle countered.

  “So maybe it took two men. He ain’t the size of a hippopotamus, for pity’s sake.”

  “Since when are you an expert on hippopotamuses?”

  Ruby Bee crossed her arms. “For your information, the word is ‘hippopotami.’ ”

  My head began to throb. “Please go find the information about Mr. Ridner. The sheriff’s team should be here any minute.” I stuffed another cracker in my mouth. If Ruby Bee and Estelle caught me in a bout of morning sickness, I’d be inundated with advice and herbal remedies. “Did Ridner come in his own car?”

  “I reckon so. I don’t exactly assign parking spots in front of each unit.” Ruby Bee took another look at the body. “I’d say he’s more the size of a sea lion.”

  “You saying he weighs a ton?” Estelle said skeptically.

  “A small sea lion,” said Ruby Bee, who’d never been closer to a sea lion than she had an African lion. In her world, “lion” was a participle.

  They were still bickering as they drove away. I sat back down in my car. The thumpety-thump in my head was almost drowned out by the gurgles in my stomach. My eyeballs were grainy, and my mouth felt as if I’d been chewing straw. Across the road a few children were hunting golf balls with the same gleeful enthusiasm reserved for Easter eggs. More cars drove by at a turtlish speed, and traffic was backing up beyond the stoplight. Apparently Maggody offered more excitement than Branson.

  I was ready to hide under the boat when cars from the sheriff’s department finally appeared, along with McBeen, the medical examiner. He is not easy to deal with under the midday sun. At 7:00 A.M., he’d have the disposition of a belligerent sea lion and the snarl of an African one. I dearly hoped no one pointed out to him that his socks didn’t match.

  Harve looked at the body, then stepped back to let his men examine the scene. “You didn’t tell me the victim was the sumbitch that made a hole-in-one,” he said. “If I’d known, I would have gone back to bed.”

  “I never knew you were such a sore loser. It’s only a boat, fercrissake.”

  “No, it’s a Ranger Z21 with an Evinrude, hydro jack plate, and a
trolling motor. It retails for forty-two thousand dollars. It’s got the grace of an acrobat and the horsepower of a professional wrassler.” His jowls trembled as he sighed, and his eyes were teary. He took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose. I would have given him a hug if I wasn’t so fond of the arrangement of my facial features. “Yesterday I hit four greens,” he continued sadly. “I was sure I was going to get one to roll in. I could feel it in my bones, same as like my great-aunt could predict rain because of her sciatica. But then you show up and that sumbitch makes a hole-in-one. I don’t like coincidences.”

  “It wasn’t any of my doing, but go ahead and kill the messenger if it makes you feel better,” I said. “Or just keep puffing on that cigar. The secondhand smoke’ll get me sooner or later.”

  Harve’s expression turned surly. “Don’t push your luck. I didn’t get to bed but four hours ago. I’ll tell you one thing—Murtle is gonna be on the night shift until he hobbles away with a pension check. Damn moron should have known better than to turn his back on those pissants. They’d set their own grandmas on fire for the fun of it.”

  “You need a better class of inmates. In the future, only arrest embezzlers and stodgy judges caught in motel rooms with their pants around their ankles and fifteen-year-old cheerleaders in the bed. Lawyers, on the other hand, might set their grandmothers on fire and then sue for mental anguish.”

  “I don’t need any crap from you, little lady. The three escapees are still free, and the Farberville police chief ain’t happy about housing the rest of the inmates. How in the hell am I supposed to coordinate a manhunt when I don’t have an office? No desk, no telephone, and half my deputies gone fishin’. When I set up a command post in the dining room, Mrs. Dorfer threatened to go visit her mother for a month. I ain’t partial to cold pizza for breakfast and canned ravioli for supper.”

  I tried to dredge up some sympathy, but it wasn’t in me. “I’m going by Ruby Bee’s to pick up info on the victim, decorate his motel room door with yellow tape, and then go to the PD to write up a report.”

  “You ain’t going anywhere ’til I say so.”

  “Watch me.”

  “What you are going to do is get a statement from every last soul in town, including the golfers, the parolees at the trailer park, the tournament organizers, and all those shifty Buchanon mutants that lurk around town.”

  “Like Mrs. Jim Bob?” I asked sweetly. “She falls into several of those categories.”

  McBeen joined us before Harve could respond. “Chief of Police Hanks, I should have known you were involved when my phone rang at an ungodly hour. This town has to be the most toxic landfill in the state. You ought to open a funeral home.”

  He had a point. When I first moved back to Maggody, I complained that nothing ever happened. That was, of course, before we were invaded by silver aliens, militiamen, tabloid reporters, Civil War reenactors, celebrity drug addicts, and other barbarian hordes. These days, we should put up a warning sign at the city limits. Kevin could stand beside the road to hand out disclaimers and bulletproof vests.

  “Cause of death?” Harve asked.

  “Multiple fractures of the skull, for starters.” McBeen sneered at me as if I were responsible for the primitive attack. “I don’t know the time of death, but I’d estimate five to seven hours ago.”

  “Yo, Sheriff Dorfer,” one of the deputies called, “I think I found the weapon.”

  Harve and I went over to the boat. “There’s a golf club wedged down here between the body and the side panel,” the deputy continued. “You’ll see it better after they move the body. There’s blood on the, uh, handle.”

  “What did I do to deserve this?” Harve muttered. “A golf club has three parts: grip, shaft, and head. If this is too complicated for you, just remember the grip is what you grip. The shaft is what you’re gonna get if you screw up, and the head is like that useless thing sitting on your shoulders, except it’s not filled with feathers and lint like yours.”

  Other deputies peered at what was presumably the weapon. All of them could have rattled off the names of the most minute parts of a rifle or a fishing rod. They could build a deer stand with their eyes closed. They could gut a squirrel with one hand. And they probably knew as much about golf as they did about opera and haute cuisine.

  I’d had enough of the crime scene. I left Harve cussing at me in the parking lot and went to Ruby Bee’s. There were a few cars and pickups out front. I sat down on a barstool next to Estelle, who was sipping coffee. Ruby Bee came out of the kitchen with plates in each hand, glanced at me, and then headed for the booths.

  “What were you two doing out so early this morning?” I asked Estelle.

  “Ol’ Fatback Buchanon stopped by my house to see if I wanted to buy fresh eggs. After I finished bawling him out on account of the hour, he told me that he saw you in front of the SuperSaver. I called Ruby Bee to inquire what you were doing, and she was as bumfuzzled as Fatback. Do you remember him? He has six fingers on his right hand, and his pinkie twitches like a caterpillar on a hot griddle.”

  “No.” I lifted off the glass dome of a pie stand and took out a warm cinnamon roll. “Tommy Ridner was here last night, right?”

  “He most certainly was, along with a swarm of folks. Most of them were pie-eyed when they came in from the golf tournament supper. Well, maybe not the ladies so much. Ridner made a hole-in-one yesterday, and he was crowing like a banty rooster. Not everybody was as smitten as he was. Around eleven he went out to his unit and came back with a golf club and balls. He had this idea how they should have a contest to see who could hit the stoplight.”

  I closed my eyes. “And?”

  “You’d think Jim Bob would know better, but he slammed a twenty-dollar bill on the table and said he was ready. He wasn’t the only one, I might add. Earl wanted to make it fifty dollars. Larry Joe and Luke said they were in. That pretty girl with ash blond hair said she’d show all of ’em who was the best. This got Bony all riled up—he wanted everybody to put in a hundred dollars.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

  “Ruby Bee put a stop to it. She gave ’em a lecture about disturbing the peace and destroying city property, and then threatened to close right then and there if anyone so much as stepped out the door with a golf club. They backed down after that.”

  The hell they did, I thought, remembering the children who were scavenging for golf balls in the weeds across from the Super-Saver. The golf balls had not fallen from the sky or mystically appeared with the morning dew.

  A thickset woman with peppery cropped hair, flat features, and the broad shoulders of a swimmer leaned against the bar. Her sweatpants and blue work shirt were utilitarian and far from flattering. I could easily picture her as a bouncer at a biker chick bar. “Hello!” she shouted. “Does anybody work here?”

  Ruby Bee bustled around the far end of the bar. “I do, and it ain’t my fault if you woke up with your knickers in a knot. What do you want?”

  “Coffee,” the woman said in a more subdued voice. “Black.” She pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and blotted her nose. I remembered that I’d seen her the day before, sitting alone at a table and muffling sneezes with a tissue.

  I resumed trying to envision the previous evening. Tommy Ridner had been celebrating, as to be expected. The other players in the tournament (I hesitated to refer to them as golfers) had been annoyed, also to be expected. Beer had flowed like Boone Creek in the spring. When Ruby Bee’s closed at midnight, the party had continued. I needed to know who slunk off to bed and who stayed up late enough to kill Tommy Ridner.

  Still at the far end of the bar, Ruby Bee said, “Arly! Ms. Coulter here says she went by the PD and it was locked.”

  “The door isn’t locked. It sticks when it’s humid.”

  Estelle jabbed me with her elbow. “Go see what the lady wants. She looks mean enough to be a killer. Maybe she wants to confess.”

  I finished the cinnamon roll, w
iped my fingers on a napkin, then took a stool next to Ms. Coulter. “I’m the entirety of the local police department. I’d show you my badge, but I don’t have it with me at the moment. Is there something I can do for you?”

  The woman held out a hand. “I’m Janna Coulter, Natalie Hotz’s manager. Your name is . . . ?”

  “Arly Hanks.” I held out my hand as well, and tried not to wince when she clamped it. “Why are you looking for me, Ms. Coulter?”

  “Call me Janna. You do know who Natalie Hotz is, don’t you?” She grimaced when I shook my head. “Well, you should. She’s the upcoming LPGA star. She’s won the state tournament for three years and will go pro this fall.”

  “Impressive,” I murmured, unimpressed. “I don’t moonlight as a sportswriter, so if there’s nothing else I can do for you, I guess we’re done.”

  Janna grabbed my arm. “I want to report an assault.”

  I felt a tingle of fear for whoever had tried it. “Who assaulted you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Natalie’s the victim. I insisted that she sleep late this morning, so she can concentrate on her second round today. Every media opportunity counts, even”—she rolled her eyes—“in a place like this.”

  “Who assaulted her?”

  Her shoulders sagged. “I don’t know, and she was too upset to tell me. It happened last night. After dinner, she insisted that we join the others in the bar to congratulate Tommy Ridner. I saw no point in it, but I reluctantly agreed. It was dreadful, of course, and we didn’t stay long.”

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “Back to our room, of course. I was already in bed when Natalie discovered that she’d left her wallet in the bar. I took an antihistamine and started reading, but I dozed off and didn’t wake up until Natalie crept into the room. Her clothes were dirty and her hair was a mess. When I asked, she started sobbing and admitted that she’d been attacked in the parking lot. That’s all I could get out of her.”