Big Foot Stole My Wife Page 15

  I studied the object of Harve’s displeasure. Red Gromwell was local, a young guy, maybe thirty, with a sly face already turning soft and greasy hair the color of a rotting orange. At the moment, he had a swollen lip, the beginnings of a black eye, and a ragged streak of blood down the side of his face. His knuckles were raw. His jacket was stained with blood, as were the baggy jeans that rode low on his hips out of deference to his beer gut. He gave me a foolish grin, dropped the handkerchief, and crumpled to the ground. The deputies hauled him to his feet, and the three began to climb toward the road.

  “Drunker than a boiled owl,” Harve said, firing up the cigar butt. “Says he and a guy named Buell Fumitory was out riding around, sharing a bottle and yucking it up. All of a sudden the truck’s bouncing down the hill like one of those bumper cars at the county fair. Says he was thrown out the window and landed way yonder in that clump of brush. Buell over there wasn’t as lucky.”

  I folded my arms and tried to be a cool, detached cop. My eyes kept sneaking to the shrouded body on the ground, however, and I doubt Harve was fooled one whit. I tried to swallow, but my mouth was as dry as the dusty road behind us. “Did Buell drown?” I asked.

  “I can’t say right offhand. He was banged up pretty bad from hitting his face against the steering wheel who knows how many times. It doesn’t much matter—in particular to him. Red said by the time he could git himself up and stagger to the edge of the water, it was clear there wasn’t anything to do for Buell. He did manage to climb back to the road and flag down a truck driver who called us.”

  “Red’s not the heroic sort,” I said, shaking my head. “He’d just as soon run down a dog as bother to brake.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes indeed. He works at the body shop and brawls at the pool hall. I had some unpleasant encounters with him after his wife finally got fed up with him and filed for divorce. Twice I drove her to the women’s shelter in Farberville and urged her to stay for a few days, but she scooted right back and refused to file charges, so there wasn’t much I could do.”

  “One of those, huh?” Harve said through a cloud of noxious cigar smoke.

  “One of those.” I again found myself staring at the blanket. “Buell Fumitory kept to himself, so I don’t know much about him. He moved here … oh, a year ago, and worked at the supermarket. He came into Ruby Bee’s every now and then for a beer. He seemed okay to me.”

  “According to this Red fellow, Buell was driving at the time of the accident. I reckon it’s too late to give him a ticket.” Harve snuffed out the cigar butt and looked over my shoulder. “Here come the boys with the body bag. Tell ya what, Arly,” he said, putting his arm around me and escorting me up the hill, “I’m gonna let you have this one for your very own. I need Les and John Earl to finish up the paperwork on those burglaries over in Hasty, and I myself am gonna be busier than a stump-tailed cow in fly time with office chores.”

  I shrugged off his arm. “Like posing for the media with the latest haul of marijuana? This sudden activity doesn’t have anything to do with the upcoming election, does it?”

  “You just hunt up the next of kin and write me a couple of pages of official blather,” he said. Trying not to smirk, he left me at the road and went down to supervise the medics.

  As I stood there berating myself for getting stuck so easily with nothing but tedious paperwork, a tow truck came down the road. Once the body and the truck were removed, the squirrels would venture back, as would the birds, the bugs, and the fish that lurked in the muddy creek. The splintered saplings would be replaced by a new crop. Three months from then, I told myself with a grimace, there would be nothing left to remind folks about the dangers of D.W.I. In some states, it’s called other things. In Arkansas, we opt for the simple and descriptive Driving While Intoxicated. Might as well call it Dying While Intoxicated.

  “It doesn’t make a plugged nickel’s worth of sense,” Ruby Bee proclaimed from behind the bar. She rinsed off the glasses in the sink, wiped her hands on her apron, and gazed beadily at Estelle, who was drinking a beer and gobbling up pretzels like she was a paying customer.

  “That sort of thing happens all the time,” Estelle countered. “They were drunk, and anybody with a smidgen of the sense God gave a goose knows it’s asking for trouble to go drinking and driving, particularly out on those twisty back roads. Remember that time I was coming back from a baby shower in Emmet, and this big ol’ deer came scampering into the road, and I nearly—”

  “Nobody said there was a deer involved. Lottie said that Elsie happened to hear Red talking to some fellow at the launderette earlier this morning, and he said Buell was singing and howling like a tomcat and was a sight too far gone to keep his eyes or anything else on the road.” She began to dry the glasses on a dishrag, all the while frowning and trying to figure out what was nagging at her. “The thing is,” she added slowly, “I didn’t think Buell was like that. He was always real nice when he worked in produce. One time I bought a watermelon, and when I cut—”

  “I don’t see why he couldn’t have been real nice and also been willing to drink cheap whisky and take a drive.”

  “I ain’t saying he wasn’t,” Ruby Bee said, still speaking slowly and getting more bumfuzzled by the minute. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Estelle—he never came in here and guzzled down a couple of pitchers like Red did. Like Red did before I threw him out on his skinny behind, that is. It like to cost me three hundred dollars to get the jukebox fixed. And to think he busted it just because his ex-wife was drinking a glass of beer with that tire salesman!”

  “He was hotter than a fire in a pepper mill, wasn’t he?” Estelle said as she picked up a pretzel. “I wish somebody’d find the gumption to mention to him that what his ex-wife does is none of his business. It ain’t like he bought a wife; he was only renting one. It’s a crying shame he wasn’t the one to end up in the creek so Gayle can get on with her life and stop having to peek over her shoulder every time she steps out of the house.”

  “How’d she take the news?”

  Estelle lowered her voice, although anybody could see there wasn’t another soul in the barroom, much less hanging over her shoulder like a lapel. “Well, Lottie said Mrs. Jim Bob happened to run by Gayle’s with some ironing, and Gayle wouldn’t even come to the door. Mrs. Jim Bob saw the curtain twitch, so she knew perfectly well that Gayle was home at the time.”

  “I don’t see that she has any reason to …”

  Estelle gave her a pitying look. “To avoid Mrs. Jim Bob? I’d say we all had darn good reasons to do that. I could make you a list as long as your arm.”

  “Unless, of course …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Well, if Gayle was …”

  “I do believe you could finish a sentence, Mrs. Dribble Mouth, and do it before the sun sets in Bogart County.”

  Not bothering to respond, Ruby Bee stared at the jukebox with a deepening frown. “You know,” she said about the time Estelle was preparing to make another remark, “the last time I saw Gayle at the Emporium, she was looking right frumpy. What she needs is a perm, Estelle, and you’re the one to give it to her. I suspect it’ll have to be for free; she barely makes minimum wage at the poultry plant in Starley City. Why doncha call her right now and make an appointment?”

  “For free?” Estelle gasped. “Why in tarnation would I do a thing like that?”

  Ruby Bee curled her finger, and this time she was the one to speak in a low, conspiratorial voice. Estelle managed not to butt in, and ten minutes later she was dialing Gayle Gromwell’s telephone number.

  The next morning I got the address of Buell Fumitory’s rent house from the manager at the supermarket. He told me that Buell had worked there for most of a year, caused no trouble, took no unauthorized days off, and got along with the other employees.

  Armed with the above piercing insights, I drove out past Raz Buchanon’s shack to an ordinary frame house in a scruffy yard. A rusty subcompact was par
ked beside the house, but no one answered my repeated knocks. I considered doing something clever with a skeleton key or a credit card to gain entry. However, having neither, I opened the front door and went inside.

  The interior was as ordinary as the exterior. It was clearly a bachelor’s domain. There were a few dirty ashtrays and a beer can on the coffee table, odds and ends of food in the refrigerator, chipped dishes and a cracked cup in the cabinets. The only anomaly was a vase with a handful of wilted daisies, but even tomato stackers can have a romantic streak.

  I continued on my merry way. The bedroom was small and cluttered, but no more so than my apartment usually was. The closet contained basic clothing and fishing equipment. The drawer in the bedside table had gum wrappers, nail clippers, a long overdue electric bill, and an impressive selection of condom packets. Perhaps somebody in the morgue would encourage Buell to continue practicing safe sex in the netherworld.

  In the distance, most likely at Raz’s place, a dog began to bark dispiritedly. As if in response, the house creaked and sighed. It wasn’t a mausoleum, and I wasn’t about to lapse into a gothic thing involving involuntary shivers and a compulsion to clutch my bosom and flutter my eyelashes. On the other hand, I recalled the blanketed body alongside the creek, and I wasted no time, pawing through dresser drawers until I found a stack of letters and an address book.

  I sat down on the bed and flipped through the latter until I found the listing for Aunt Pearl in Boise. If she was not the official next of kin, she would know who was. The letters turned out to be commercial greeting cards, all signed with a smiley face. I made a frowny face, stuffed them back in the drawer, and returned to the PD to see if Aunt Pearl might be sitting by her telephone in Boise.

  She was, but she was also hard of hearing and very old. Once I’d conveyed the news, she admitted she was the only living relative. Her financial situation precluded funeral arrangements. I assured her that we would deal with it, hung up, and leaned back in my chair to ponder how best to share this with Harve. There was very little of value at Buell’s house. A small television, furniture that would go to the Salvation Army (if they’d take it), and a couple of boxes of personal effects. The pitiful car would bring no more than a hundred dollars.

  The pitiful car. I propped my feet on the corner of the desk and tried to figure out why there was a car, pitiful or not, parked at Buell’s house. He did not seem like a two-car family. Glumly noting that the water stain on the ceiling had expanded since last I’d studied it, I called the manager at the supermarket and asked him what Buell had driven. He grumbled but agreed to ask the employees, and came back with a description of the subcompact.

  Red Gromwell drove an ancient Mustang; I’d pulled him over so many times that I knew the license plate by heart. The pickup truck in the creek had been gray, or white and dirty. I thought this over for a while (bear in mind it was Friday morning, so I wasn’t preparing to foil bank robberies or negotiate with kidnappers).

  I called the sheriff’s department and got Harve on the line.

  “You’re not backing out on that D.W.I. report, are you?” he asked before I could get out a word. “I hate to stick you with it, Arly, but I’m up to my neck in some tricky figures for the upcoming quorum meeting, and one of the county judges says—”

  “What’d you do with Red Gromwell?”

  There was a lengthy silence. At last Harve exhaled and said, “Nothing much, damn it. We kept him in the drunk tank for twelve hours. This morning he called his cousin for bail money and strolled out like a preacher on his way to count the offering. I checked with the county prosecutor, but it ain’t worth bothering with. If he’d been driving, we could cause him some grief. Not that much, though. Get his driver’s license suspended, slap him with a fat fine. The judge’d lecture him for twenty minutes, and maybe give him some probation. The prisons are stuffed to the gills right now, and I sure don’t need to offer the likes of Red Gromwell room and board, courtesy of Stump County.”

  I waited until he stopped sighing, then asked him to ascertain the ownership of the truck that had been pulled out of Boone Creek. He huffed and puffed some more while I wondered how badly the PD roof was leaking and finally agreed to have Les call the tow shop (sigh), get the truck’s plate number (siigh), and call the state office (siiigh) to see who all was named on the registration.

  On that breezy note, we parted. I did some noisy exhaling of my own, but all it accomplished was to make me woozy. It occurred to me that I was in need of both local gossip and a blue plate special, so I abandoned any pretense of diligent detection and walked down the road to Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill, the hot spot for food and fiction.

  It was closed. Irritated, I went back to my car, drove to the Dairee Dee-Lishus where the food was less palatable but decidedly better than nothing, and promised myself a quiet picnic out by the rubble of the gas station. Twenty minutes later, I was turning down County 103.

  “It’d be cute all curly around your face,” Ruby Bee said brightly. “Brush those bangs out of your eyes and wear a little makeup, and you’d look just like a homecoming queen.”

  “I don’t know,” Gayle Gromwell said. She didn’t sound like she did, either. She sounded more like she was real sorry about coming to Estelle’s Hair Fantasies, even if the perm was free. Nobody’d said the event was open to the public.

  Estelle nudged Ruby Bee out of the way. “I happen to be professionally trained in these matters,” she said with a pinched frown. “Now, Gayle honey, I have to agree that those bangs make you look like a dog that came out of the rain a day late. I’m just going to snip a bit here and there, give you some nice, soft curls, and then we’ll see if maybe you don’t want an auburn rinse.”

  Gayle looked a little pouty, but this wasn’t surprising since she wasn’t much older than twenty and still had a few blemishes and the faint vestiges of baby fat. She slouched in the chair and gazed blackly at her image in the mirror, refusing to meet Estelle’s inquisitive eyes or even Ruby Bee’s penetrating stare. “Oh, go ahead and do whatever you want. I know my hair looks awful, but I don’t care. Why don’t you shave it off?”

  “It’s going be real pretty,” Estelle said nervously. This wasn’t what she and Ruby Bee had hoped for, although Gayle had come and that was the first hurdle. She wiggled her eyebrows at Ruby Bee. “Don’t you think Gayle here will have every boy in town chasing after her?”

  Ruby Bee knew a cue when she heard one. “I just hope Red’s simmered down. Remember when he put his fist through the jukebox because of that tire salesman? They charged me three hundred dollars.”

  They both looked at Gayle, wondering what she’d say. Her eyes were closed, but as they watched, a tear squeezed out and slunk down her cheek alongside her nose. Within the hour, they had the whole teary, hiccuppy, disjointed story.

  “Two weeks ago?” I echoed, admittedly less than brilliantly. “The truck was purchased two weeks ago?”

  “A private sale,” Les continued. “I tracked down the previous owner, who said he’d advertised the damn thing for three weeks running and was about to sell it for scrap when some guy showed up with a hundred bucks.”

  “Some guy? What did he look like?”

  “Nothing special. Dark hair, wearing jeans and a work shirt, sunglasses, cap. Average height and weight, no initials carved in his forehead or neon antlers or anything.”

  “And he didn’t catch the guy’s name, I suppose?”

  “You suppose right. This was strictly cash-and-carry.”

  I tried once more. “What about the registration papers?”

  “Never transferred.”

  I hung up and went to the back room of the PD to glower at my evidence. It didn’t take long. The bloodstained handkerchief was in one plastic bag and an empty liter whisky bottle in another. I hadn’t been in the mood to take scrapings of mud from the bank or water from the creek. Harve, the deputies, the medics, and the tow truck operator had all tromped around; if there had been a telltale footprint, i
t had been obliterated (and I couldn’t imagine a footprint telling much of a tale, anyway).

  There was no point in dusting the bottle for fingerprints. If I bothered, and then found Red and took his to compare, I’d have a lovely match. It was a policeish activity, but also a futile one. As for the handkerchief, I knew where the blood came from and I didn’t care where the handkerchief did.

  And I knew where the truck came from, but I didn’t know who had bought it or why. I realized I again was making a frowny face. This was of no significance, but it led my thoughts back to the smiley faces on the cards, and that led me to the contents of the bedside drawer, the daisies, the white pickup truck, and before too long I was staring at the whisky bottle and wondering how I could prove Red Gromwell had murdered Buell Fumitory—soberly and in cold blood. Then I realized I had the evidence in front of me. I went back to the telephone, called Les, and said, “Do you have a date tonight?”

  “I don’t think my wife will approve, but what do you have in mind?”

  “What happened to Gayle’s hair?” I said to Ruby Bee as I watched Gayle and Les settle in a back booth. “Didn’t her mother warn her about sticking a fork in a socket?”

  Ruby Bee leaned across the bar and whispered, “This ain’t the time for smart remarks. I don’t seem to recollect anyone complimenting you on that schoolmarm hair of yours. I happen to have something that you might find interestin’, if you can shut your mouth long enough to hear it.”

  I meekly shut my mouth, mostly because I might have time to eat a piece of pie before the fireworks started. Before I could hear the big news, Estelle perched on the bar stool next to me, craned her head around until she spotted Gayle, and then turned back with a self-righteous smile. “I just knew that auburn rinse would be perfect. If Arly here would let me re-style her hair, she’d look just as nice as Gayle.”

  “So that’s why I had to eat at the Dee-Lishus today,” I said accusingly. I resisted the urge to run my fingers through my hair, which would have undone my bun and left me vulnerable to further cosmetological attacks. “Just once I wish you two would stay off the case. Believe it or not, I am more than capable of—”