The Maggody Militia Page 19

  “Well?” said Ruby Bee. “Which one was it?”

  “I don’t think Lottie ever said, because she was hellbent on telling me something else. After I left the high school library, she remembered having flipped through a magazine—Farmer’s Digest, I think she said—that had ostriches on the cover. She hunted it up and read an article about how breeding them is big business these days. The eggs are worth a thousand dollars, chicks about three thousand, and a mature pair is”—she put her hand on her mouth to hold back the makings of a whimper, but it came out anyway—“between forty-five and sixty thousand dollars. Those hissy birds that Uncle Tooly gave me are worth a fortune, and you let them run off into the woods like nothing more valuable than scruffy little guinea hens.”

  Ruby Bee didn’t recollect letting them do anything except come close to scaring her to death. However, there was no point in saying as much—or mentioning that Estelle had been the one too cowardly to open the door. “Maybe we can get them back. For all we know, they’re in your yard. If they’re not, they’re likely to be on the ridge. We’d have heard if they were wandering around town, alarming folks.”

  “What’ll we do if we find ’em? Ask ’em real politely to follow us back to the house and climb into the crate?”

  This was indeed a problem. After tossing back and forth suggestions that ranged from the ludicrous, like roping them cowboy style, to the outright insane, like jumping on their backs, they came up with a plan of sorts that involved being able to get close enough to throw bed sheets over their heads. Estelle finished her coffee while Ruby Bee collected sheets from #1, then they climbed into the station wagon and headed for Cotter’s Ridge.

  I arrived in Malthus at eight, found the sheriff’s department, identified myself, and was ushered into his office one minute later (his version of LaBelle was a nervous youngster with acne and a stammer).

  Sheriff Flatchett was almost a carbon copy of Harve in terms of bulk and age, but there was something unsavory about him, something that implied he might be persuaded to look the other way in exchange for an envelope stuffed with money. Rumor has it there are no chickens in the chicken houses of Chowden County, but instead grow lights and irrigation systems. Rumor also has it that Sheriff Flatchett spends his vacations in Europe.

  “I’ve heard of you,” he said, not bothering to stand up or feign a smile. “Over in Maggody, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said. I waited a moment to be invited to sit down, then did it anyway. “I’m here because of a string of burglaries in Stump County. One of them included a homicide.”

  “Is that so?” he said without interest.

  I reminded myself that I needed his cooperation, if not his undying devotion. “Yes, and I understand you had one here about a year ago. Maurice Smeltner was the victim.”

  “Yeah, ol’ Mo took three slugs to his abdomen and was dead as a lizard before we got there. They lived way the hell out at the end of an unpaved road. Decent house, though, with one of those above-ground pools. According to his widow, swimming was about the only exercise Mo could handle after hip-replacement surgery. He met her while he was recuperating in a nursing home, and I guess he figured he could get looked after for free if he married her. Mo preferred to keep his wallet in his pocket. Odds are he never had a Girl Scout cookie in his life.”

  “Kayleen Smeltner told me that they were awakened by the sound of breaking glass, and her husband went down to investigate. When she heard shots, she called for help and reached the top of the stairs just as three men ran out the door.”

  Flatchett nodded. “To the best of my recollection, that’s what she said. She didn’t hear an engine start up, so we assumed they parked someplace else and came on foot. We rounded up the usual suspects, as they say in Hollywood. Nobody admitted participating in it, and none of our snitches heard anything in the bars and poolrooms.”

  All the cases in Stump County had involved a vehicle, but I wasn’t ready to give up. “Did they get away with any of Smeltner’s weapons?”

  “Yeah, I seem to think they did. Hold on and I’ll pull the file. You want some coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, then waited impatiently as he left the office, bellowed at the dispatcher to fetch two cups of coffee, and eventually returned with a stained manila folder.

  He read in silence until the youngster brought the coffee and darted away. “By the time Mo got downstairs, they’d pried open the case in his office. They took a thirty-thirty rifle, a forty-four Magnum, and an Ingram MAC ten. I reckon once they shot him, they decided it might be wise to leave with what they already had.”

  I took out my notebook and read off the serial number I’d discovered in Dylan’s duffel bag. “That match?”

  “Sure does,” said Flatchett, closing the folder and giving me a sharp look. “The FBI asked me that very same question a while back. You think that this case, the cases over in your county, and that murder in Missouri are all the responsibility of one group?”

  “I don’t know what I think,” I said morosely. “Were there other burglaries around the same time?”

  “Some tools were taken from a shed not too far from the Smeltner place. A widow reported a peeping Tom, but over the years she’s reported everything from a caravan of drunken gypsies to a platoon of Nazis in the woods behind her house.” He reopened the folder and scanned the pages. “Oh, and another guy on the same road claimed that someone had left footprints in his wife’s flowerbed alongside the house. I guess all of them out that way were a might edgy. After the murder, most of them moved into town.”

  “What about burglaries elsewhere in Chowden County?”

  Flatchett began to doodle on the folder. “Nothing out of the ordinary. It used to be you were safe living in a small town, where your neighbors could keep an eye on things while you were gone. Nowadays, we got crime just like the city folks. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, but the reason I’m not hunting this weekend is that I’m supposed to attend a prayer breakfast over at the Methodist church—and elections are coming up soon.”

  I wasn’t sure if he’d been as candid as possible, but I doubted he was going to toss out anything more. “Thanks for your time, Sheriff Flatchett. Harve Dorfer and I’d appreciate it if you could let us have copies of the reports from those burglaries.”

  “I’ll fax ’em to his office tomorrow or the next day,” he said, pulling back his cuff to look at his watch. “You might want to talk to Mo’s daughter. Miss Lila’s a spinster and lives here in Malthus. I don’t know her address right off hand, but she’s in the directory.”

  I thanked him more profusely and left to find Miss Lila Smeltner.

  Dahlia had found out in no time flat that Kevvie’d had enough sense to lock the car before going off into the wilderness. She’d walked back up County 102, planning to stop at Estelle’s and call Eileen, but the house was dark and locked up tighter than a tick. Walking all the way home would have been impossible, what with the contractions so strong she had to sit down at the edge of the road and ride ’em out.

  Having decided it was too darn cold to spend the night crouched in ditches, she’d found an unlocked door at the old Wockermann place and spent the night under a tarp, shivering, groaning, and making trips outside to squat on the remains of the patio and pray some critter didn’t nip her on the butt. At dawn, she’d explored the house and found a half-full bottle of soda pop, and somewhat later, a lunch box with some stale crusts of bread and a withered apple that bore a remarkable resemblance to her granny.

  Now, the contractions had stopped for the most part. She felt a little light-headed, which is what the doctor had said would happen if she didn’t eat properly. The soda pop would fix that, she told herself as she went into the front room to look at Estelle’s house.

  The station wagon wasn’t there, and it didn’t look like any lights were on inside. She went through the kitchen and out to the patio to study the ridge. Kevvie had been the only eyewitness to the shooting, she thought as she sucked o
n her cheeks, and it was possible he’d seen something real important that he’d forgotten to tell anyone. Or maybe he had to investigate it for hisself, because it might put her and Kevin Junior in danger.

  Dahlia realized she was feeling more perky than she had in the last three months. The soda pop must have given her a sugar buzz, she decided with a contented smile, just like before she got in the family way and could eat a whole package of vanilla sandwich cookies at one time. She patted her belly. “I sure do hope you have a sweet tooth, too,” she said to Kevin Junior as she set off across the pasture, following tire tracks and humming the theme song from Gilligan’s Island.

  Jim Bob looked around real carefully as he opened the door of the trailer and pissed on the concrete block that served as a step.

  “See anything?” asked Larry Joe.

  “Yeah,” he said as he closed the door. “I saw trees and wet leaves and a squirrel on a stump next to my four-wheel. I’m shakin’ like a molded salad.”

  “You were shaking last night when you came stumbling inside, slobbering something awful. It made me think of Durasell Buchanon after he accidentally flushed his dentures down the toilet. I never could figure out why he went around telling everybody about it.”

  Jim Bob took a beer out of the cooler. “Where’s Roy?”

  “He got up early and went outside to look for more tracks in the mud. That was more than an hour ago. I’ve been watching out the window for him, but I haven’t seen so much as a branch twitch. Do you think we should go search for him?”

  “Fuck that,” said Jim Bob. “If he wants to be that goddamn stupid, he can take care of himself. Want to play some gin, dollar a point?”

  Larry Joe stayed by the window. “Joyce liked to skin me alive that last time I played gin with you and lost thirty-eight dollars. What’s more, I had to babysit all weekend while she visited her sister in Paris.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, Larry Joe! You let her go all the way to Paris over thirty-eight dollars? You’re stupider than Roy. Where would you have let her go if you’d lost a hundred dollars—the moon?”

  “It ain’t all that far,” protested Larry Joe.

  “Of course it’s all that far, you pinhead. I don’t know how you ever got certified to teach, unless you paid someone to go in your place—or you were such a pain in the ass that they gave you the certificate just to get rid of you.” Jim Bob banged down the beer can so hard that foam splashed onto the table. “Jesus H. Christ!”

  “There ain’t no reason to say those things, Jim Bob. I got my certificate because I passed all the required classes. I may not have been class valedictorian, but I do know that Paris is only about seventy-five miles from here down in Logan County. You got a problem with that?”

  “Oh, I was just yanking your cord. If you want, we can play for a dime a point,” Jim Bob said, picking up the cards.

  Lila Smeltner was dressed in church clothes when she opened the door, but her gray hair was wrapped so tightly around pink foam rollers that my scalp tingled. She was at least sixty years old, which made me wonder how she’d felt about having a stepmother who was twenty years younger, twenty pounds heavier, and a foot taller.

  “Yes?” she said suspiciously. “If you’re one of those missionaries, you can turn right around and go find someone else to pester. I’ve been a member of the First Baptist Church since I was baptized fifty-one years ago. If the Lord won’t take me as I am, I’ll negotiate with Satan for long-term accommodations.”

  I opened my coat to show her my badge. “I’m Arly Hanks from Maggody, Miss Lila. Sheriff Flatchett gave me your name. If I’m not catching you at a bad time, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Your father’s murder,” I said. “There’s been a similar case in Stump County, and I’m trying to determine if it was committed by the same men.”

  Miss Lila hesitated for a long moment, then opened the screen door. “You can ask your questions, but I don’t know anything more than what Kayleen and the sheriff told me. When Papa got remarried, I bought this little house. Three’s a crowd, you know, and Kayleen appeared to be taking good care of him. Besides, we couldn’t get cable out there.”

  The living room was sparsely furnished but meticulously clean. The only thing on the white walls was a photograph of a sour-looking couple dressed in somber clothing. I moved aside a throw pillow and sat down on a love seat that must have been purchased in a fit of girlish optimism. “So you and Kayleen got along okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t we? Papa could be very demanding and impossible to please, and I wasn’t looking forward to his arrival back home after his hip surgery. To be blunt, Miss Hanks, he was a crotchety old coot. Until I retired from the county clerk’s office, I’d have to get up at five every morning to fix breakfast, spend all day bent over ledgers, and then go home to fix supper, clean house, do laundry, make sure he’d remembered to take all his pills, and answer his correspondence. Many a time I regretted not running off with Snicker Dobson on the night we graduated from high school. He enlisted in the army the next day and was sent to Korea.”

  “Was he killed?” I asked gently.

  “Hell no,” she said. “He came back four years later and married Marigold Murt. Everybody knew there was so much incest in her family that half a dozen of them made for a full-blown family reunion.”

  I managed a smile of sorts. “So you were more than willing to step aside and allow Kayleen to take care of your father. Were you concerned about the disparity in their ages?”

  “What difference did it make to me?”

  I tried to choose my words carefully. “Well, if you thought perhaps Kayleen married your father for reasons other than …”

  “You mean did I think she was a gold digger? That vein wore out years ago. Papa owned the house outright, but I couldn’t even get fifteen thousand dollars for it when I sold it last spring. Medical bills ate up what little savings he had, and he was having to sell his gun collection to stay out of the county nursing home. Kayleen knew all that before she married him. She may have been crazy, but she wasn’t a gold digger.”

  “I guess not,” I said, thinking over what she’d said. “You inherited the family home and she got the gun collection—right?”

  “What remained of it,” said Miss Lila. “Once a month or so she’d get him to hobble out to the car and they’d go to a gun show to sell what they could. At one time the collection had been insured for twenty thousand dollars, but I’d be surprised if he had a quarter of it when he was killed by those burglars.”

  She was keeping an eye on a clock on the mantel, which warned me that my allotted time was about up. “I have one last question,” I said. “Can you tell me anything about a militia group that your father and Kayleen might have joined?”

  “I don’t know much about it, mostly because I thought it was ridiculous and told Papa so right to his face. A few years back he met some fellow at a gun show, and came home all excited because he thought he’d found a way to avoid paying taxes. It wasn’t like he was paying more than a pittance, but he would have walked into town to save gas if it hadn’t been so far. I never had a store-bought dress until I got my job at the county clerk’s office. Anyway, Papa started going to meetings and writing letters to the IRS, and it took me six months to make him understand that he could lose his property and be sent to prison if he didn’t pay taxes.”

  “I’ll let you get ready for church,” I said as I stood up. “You’ve been very helpful, Miss Lila.”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said, “but that’s your problem, not mine. Am I right in thinking Kayleen’s living in your town?”

  I nodded. “She’s planning to open a pawnshop.”

  “I’m not surprised. I always thought she was more interested in Papa’s collection than he was, but of course he was having all those health problems toward the end. Give her my regards when you see her.”

  “I’ll be sure and do that. May I ask one more question?”
>
  She went to the door and opened it. “One more, Miss Hanks. My Sunday school class is composed of teenagers. The last time I was late I found two of them grappling behind the piano.”

  “The man who encouraged your father not to pay taxes—was his name Sterling Pitts?”

  “I believe so,” she said as she closed the door.

  I swung by a fast-food joint for a sausage biscuit and orange juice, then drove back toward Maggody at a leisurely speed. My mind, on the other hand, was going a hundred miles an hour—or more.

  Chapter 14

  Dahlia was making turtlish headway up the ridge since she had to sit and catch her breath every few minutes. It didn’t help that the contractions had started up again, or that black clouds were rolling into the valley, accompanied by fierce wind and the murmur of thunder in the distance.

  She could kinda make out where folks had stomped around and left footprints in the mud, and after a spell she arrived at a clearing that fit with what Kevvie’s pa had said about the shooting the previous day. Not that he’d been there, of course, since he and Mr. McIlhaney had been too yellow-bellied to try to sneak up on Kevvie and the other fellow.

  Kevvie hadn’t been afraid, though. He’d been as brave as a real soldier like Rambo. Dahlia sat down on a log and marveled at his courage while she ate the last crust. After a few minutes, she started feeling restless again, so she heaved herself to her feet.

  She was trying to guess which way to go when she spotted a wad of paper under a bush. Her heart pounded as she unfolded it, but it proved to be nothing but a greasy wrapper from the Dairee Dee-Lishus. Still, it was a clue, so she put it in her pocket and began to climb once more.

  She’d given up wearing a wristwatch when it became impossible to find one that didn’t cut into her flesh. Now was the first time she wished she had one, since it felt like the contractions were coming more and more quickly and the doctor had said how important it was to time ’em. ’Course she was supposed to call, which was a might difficult at the moment.