Bubba and the Dead Woman (24 page)

“Wal-Mart
Supercenter
,” Bubba said and then added, “But you think I did.” It wasn’t a question.

“I think you could have.” Sheriff John’s voice was coolly objective. “I cain’t dismiss you because you some laid-back, good, ol’ boy who putters around as a mechanic down at Bufford’s Gas and Grocery most nights, dates a waitress, brings her back before ten at night, and don’t drink ‘til you pass out every Friday and Saturday night.”

“What in the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” Bubba resisted the almost overwhelming urge to slam the door shut in the sheriff’s face. “You think I go around acting the way I do, because all the while I was planning to commit a murder, maybe years in the future. Hot damn, I didn’t know I was that smart.”

“A lot of people around here don’t know you have a college degree,” said Sheriff John. He hooked one hand in his belt loop, just like Deputy Steve Simms did. Now Bubba could plainly see where the deputy had gotten the habit.

“Who would go and tell you such foolishness as that?” Bubba knew when to play dumb. A fella went and got a degree from a university, then all of a sudden he was some kind of nerd, and didn’t that look bad around a place like Pegramville? Even if his degree was in something mundane and dull as history, which was about as non-committal as a college student could get, except for maybe liberal arts.

“Your mother spilled the beans,” Sheriff John said.

Bubba made a face. Miz Demetrice had the biggest mouth at the most inconvenient times. Sure, she could run an illegal gambling ring, keep that secret, keep the local police right off of her back, but a little thing like a degree, she had to share to every cotton-picking body in the world. “So now I’m a citified fool, who coolly planned the death of my ex-fiancée for three years. How’d I get her here?”

“Don’t know. The Dearman’s nanny says that Mrs. Dearman told her that she needed to take care of some personal business in Texas, and she would be back in a few days, at most. There’s a record of a phone call to the Dearman residence from the mansion. You could have told her a bunch of lies to get her here. That you still loved her, that she was the center of your universe, that maybe you’d just up and kill yourself if you didn’t see her one more time.”

“Then why did I leave the body out in the open for everyone to see?” asked Bubba. Just when he thought he was getting ahead, Sheriff John blind-sided him with another theory that calmly put him as the cruelest man set on revenge that ever lived in Pegram County.
‘A meaner man never existed’, they would say for years to come
, thought Bubba.
‘He was so mean that he even...gasp...kicked his poor old Basset Hound.’

“Because Neal showed up unexpectantly,” Sheriff John answered, victoriously. He had that answer all ready to go. “He saw you just before you were going to cart that body off to hide it somewhere. God knows that you have a hundred or so acres of land, not to mention half of it swamp. And perfect for hiding a body. Hell, your father and about a hundred others dug enough holes on it to plant a thousand bodies in.”

“Jesus Christ, I am one bad, son of a bitch,” Bubba said bitterly.

“Then you set the fire on your own house as a diversionary tactic,” Sheriff John said. “In order to occupy the investigators with the so-called individual that’s been trying to scare you and your mother off the Snoddy lands.”

Bubba let out a deep sigh. He wasn’t about to suggest to Sheriff John that maybe Bubba himself snookered Neal into buying that fancified equipment to make sounds in the mansion, too. Even if it was sarcastic in nature, it would be like handing his head over to the sheriff on a silver platter. And he wasn’t going to bring up Melvin Wetmore, Mark Evans, and the elusive Mary Bradley because Sheriff John would probably blow holes in those theories as well. “I guess you got it all figured out. Now what?”

“I’m waiting for some ballistics on the bullet that killed Neal. We dug it out of the Donut Shop beside Ledbetter’s Realty. We’ll need to confiscate all of the weapons in the house, Bubba, for comparison.” Sheriff John smiled widely, kind of like what Bubba imagined the grin of a great white shark would be like, right before it ate someone.

“You got a warrant?” Bubba asked nicely.

Sheriff John patted his shirt pocket. “You want to read it?”

“You know what?” Bubba was as tired as a man could be without falling on his face flat out on the floor. “I do.” And he did, much to Sheriff John’s consternation, from front to back, and in slow excruciating detail, pausing to look up every third word in the family’s oversized Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. By the time Bubba finally finished the warrant he could hear Sheriff John’s top teeth grinding away at the bottom. An hour later, Sheriff John left the mansion with every single gun in his legal possession. Miz Demetrice had been woken up, and followed Sheriff John around the house, saying, “You going to leave us without protection, Mr. Sheriff Man? This is just another example of po-lice harassment. Just wait until I talk to Lawyer Petrie. He eats people like you for breakfast, and poops ‘em out at lunch. I’m going to call every congressman from Texas about this morally deficient outrage! Did we wake up in the Soviet Union this morning? Do we live in communist China, now? This is exactly the reason that we have the Constitution of the United States of America! We have every right to bear just as damn many arms as we can buy!”

To Bubba’s amazement, Sheriff John didn’t even lose his temper once. He merely collected all of the weapons, which included some that Bubba didn’t know about, much less even knew what to call them, placed them in a box, wrote out a receipt for them, and presented the paper to Miz Demetrice.

She leaned out the kitchen door, dressed in her scarlet robe and screamed at the county car as it pulled away, “I bet you don’t do this right next to an election year!”

Bubba went to the telephone in the kitchen, and held the receiver in one hand, while he flipped through the yellow pages.

Miz Demetrice watched him with something akin to astonishment. She was so furious that she couldn’t believe that her son was so calm. She had figured that everything would be just hunky-dory once Sheriff John figured out that her son, Bubba, was just the most innocent man on the face of the planet. All they had to do was wait it out, and then, Sheriff John would say, ‘Okey-dokey, you can go on home. Sorry about all the accusations, and name-calling, and general defaming that went on. We’ll print a retraction in the paper.’

But it didn’t happen. And even worse, it didn’t look like it was going to happen. Then there was her son, looking like nothing had happened to him, and although he was as black as a coal miner, he was going down one page of the telephone book with his index finger. He made a call, poking on the numbers as if he had all the time in the world. He waited, and then asked, “I sure would like to know when the next train to Dallas is?”

Miz Demetrice’s mouth dropped open.

“It is? Well, that’s just great. Can you tell me if you have any seats on it? You do. Yes, it’s an early train, isn’t it?” Bubba tapped on the cover of the telephone book absently. “I know the weather has been a little mild here...thank you, I think I’m a nice fella, even at five in the morning. Good-bye, now.”

Bubba disconnected the line with one blackened hand. He dialed again, and listened to the phone for a long time before someone answered on the other end. “Miz Adelia? Yes, I know what time it is...a dream about what...Tom Cruise...Is that right?...No, I ain’t never dreamt about Tom Cruise...Maybe Sylvester Stallone once...but that was completely innocent...Listen, we had a fire out here...No, everyone is okay...Ma is her normal self...That’s right, as mean as hell...I’m a gonna put her on a train to Dallas this morning, and I don’t want you to come to the house for the rest of the week...I’ll give you a call...Consider it a paid vacation.” He looked up as Miz Demetrice started to say something loudly and then abruptly shut her mouth. “You just rest up for the week, and when Miz Demetrice comes back, we’ll all be ready to take her orneriness on then. Bye, Ma’am.”

Miz Demetrice stared at her only son with what he termed the glare of doom. It was a look perfected over years of sheer biliousness, practiced on hapless shop keeper, card cheaters, and mayors who didn’t toady to the Snoddy matriarch as the rightful ruler of her own universe. She had used it on her son on the odd occasion, when it was warranted, until her son had figured out that it was only a look, and nothing that could hurt him personally. Unless one counted the grudge Miz Demetrice could hold for months, and in some cases, years.

Bubba gave her back a look, measure for measure. “You’re going. If I have to carry you, kicking and screaming.”

“You don’t think I’ll kick and scream?” she asked slowly, dangerously.

“I don’t care if you tell people I beat you with a big stick, you’re going. So you might as well get dressed and pack your clothes. I’ll call Aunt Caressa.” Bubba would have smiled at the expression of utter disbelief on his mother’s face, but he knew that if he did, he would suffer for the remainder of his natural life, if he even had one, after that.

In the end, Bubba escorted Miz Demetrice to the Amtrak station, with minimal fuss. He smelled like smoke, dressed in jeans rescued from his blackened bedroom, and Precious wanted to fight over the passenger’s seat. But he passed his mother onto the train conductor like he was presenting the Queen of England to the President of the United States of America.

Miz Demetrice took turns scowling at her son and the train conductor, who was clearly flustered.

At the train station there was at least ten families seeing someone else off on the 7 AM train to Dallas. Half of them couldn’t wait to call someone about Bubba’s mother escaping his clutches to run off to Dallas. By the time, the news got back to Mary Lou Treadwell, operator of the emergency line, the story was that Bubba himself had hijacked the 7 AM train with an Uzi submachine gun, and taken one hundred screaming hostages.

It was all the same to Bubba. He had gotten rid of Miz Demetrice. The angels very nearly wept.

Chapter Sixteen - Bubba and the Epiphany –

Saturday

Bubba Snoddy was one tired, smelly, sorry-looking individual. He had a black eye that had evolved into a sickening purplish-green color, and a bruised cheek that was just turning brownish-yellow-black. A knot the size of a tennis ball showed prominently on his forehead. There was a matching knot on the back of his head that made his normally well-groomed hair look like it was pushed up from having slept on it while it was wet. Both bumps made it impossible to wear his Stetson the way any God-fearing Texan was supposed to wear it. Still hacking out smoke-induced phlegm from exposure to the fire at the caretaker’s house, his voice sounded like he was a life-long whiskey and cigar man. He smelled like he’d been the chef at an all-day barbeque, and rubbed the ashes all over his body, which surely didn’t smell right to any individual with any kind of normal sense of olfactory modality. Finally, he hadn’t slept as much as a large, growing boy ought to sleep, and this consequently resulted in his present state of crotchetiness.

Fellow Pegramville residents might liken that to Bubba possessing the normal Snoddy genes. That would be normal for Snoddys, to be precise. Genes much like both his mother and his father possessed. These were genes for which his forebears had been well-known.

After making sure that his mother, Miz Demetrice, claiming duress the entire time, boarded the 7 AM Amtrak train to Dallas, Texas, Bubba was not feeling the least bit sociable. Several people tried to say their howdies to the man at the station, but were dissuaded either by the grim look on his face, the bruises on his person, or the smell of him in general. A few were firmly deterred by all of the above.

“My God,” said Bryan McGee, who was still waiting on his truck to be repaired at Bufford’s Gas and Grocery, and didn’t think much of George Bufford for his extra-marital activities with Rosa Granado, even if she was a hot little tamale. Bryan was there at the Amtrak to pick up his sister-in-law, who was traveling up from Lake Charles, Louisiana, and was specifically coming to pester Bryan into an early grave, while his wife, her sister, had her gall-bladder removed. But now, while his sister-in-law, Henrietta, was collecting her luggage, and badgering some poor bastard of a porter, Bryan was staring with startled big brown eyes at Bubba Snoddy.

Bryan had heard the stories, and had even spoken to George Bufford, himself via cellular phone, about his disabled Ford truck, yet sitting in Bufford’s garage, while old George was off carousing with hot Rosa in the Bahamas. All that aside, it didn’t prepare him for what Bubba looked like of late. He seemed as though he should be in a hospital, with all that battering. It looked like someone had dropped the A-bomb on that poor boy.

Meanwhile, everyone with a mouth in Pegramville was talking about Bubba, and the murders of Melissa Dearman and Neal Ledbetter. Now there had been some mighty fishy goings-on over at the Snoddy Mansion. While Bryan was waiting on Henrietta to disembark from the train, Stella Lackey told him that a fire had consumed the Snoddy place right down to the foundation. Furthermore, she said that Bubba Snoddy was running around stark-naked, yelling things about the invasion of communist Cuban dissidents. Or maybe it had been communist Korean dissidents. Stella wasn’t rightly sure, because she hadn’t sleep too well since Newt Durley had knocked her telephone pole down in an abhorrent spree of reckless and dangerous drunken driving. Consequently, she hadn’t had phone service with which to call the police because the telephone company contained, in her opinion, a bunch of sorry, money-grubbing, sons of bitches.

“Which has what to do with Bubba Snoddy?” Bryan asked when Stella said that.

“Nothing, but it just means I cain’t recollect everything of late. So it was either communist Cubans or communist Koreans. One or t’other,” Stella said, adjusting her false teeth in her mouth, with a total lack of personable etiquette. She was getting to be in her eighties and didn’t justifiably care what most other folks thought of her behavior. The only reason she was at the Amtrak station was to pick up her son, Charles, who was coming in from New Orleans to talk her into moving into a retirement home. Stella cackled to herself at that, and moved away from Bryan, who stared at the older woman as if she was becoming senile right in front of his eyes.