Calamity Jayne (14 page)

C
HAPTER
13

“Son of a bitch! I’d know that tight-ass anywhere. Good god, Turner, what the hell are you doing back here?” Rick Townsend
thundered.

I was feeling pukie again. The man was going ballistic, and he hadn’t even ID’d my cohort in crime yet.

“Hands up! Turn around slowly!”

Oh, terrific, he’d called in the cavalry. Deputy Dick-head to the rescue! I pulled myself off the side of the boat and turned
very, very slowly around.

“Don’t shoot!” I raised my hands. “I’m unarmed.”

“You again!” Deputy Doug Samuels’s eyes were almost as big as the corpse’s.

I made a feeble attempt at a smile. “Yeah. Me again. But this time there really
is
a dead body. One you can see, touch, and”—I shuddered—“step in.”

“Body? That it next to you?” Deputy Doug asked. “What’s it doing hanging over the edge of the boat like that?”

“Uh, no.” I looked back at Joe, who I guessed was long over his vomiting, but was now in hiding from his grandson. “That isn’t
the body. Not the dead one, anyway. At least, he wasn’t a few minutes ago.”

“Who the hell is it, then?” Deputy Samuels asked.

Townsend holstered his weapon and stepped forward. “That skinny ass in the neon green would be Joseph Townsend.”

“Your grandfather?
That
Joseph Townsend?”

“The Joseph Townsend who has a hell of a lot of explaining to do.”

“Forget Joe, he’s fine. Maybe his electrolytes are out of kilter.” I turned to Deputy Samuels. “He has a really rocking metabolism.
It’s the body over there that needs your attention.” I pointed in the direction of the not-yet-stiff stiff.

“Nice. Real nice.” Mr. T decided it was time to come up for air. “You know, I could have had a massive coronary which required
lifesaving measures and what do you do? You tell them ‘forget Joe, he’s fine.’ Forget him? You’re more concerned with the
dead than the living!”

“Oh, poor baby. Maybe later Mrs. Winegardner can kiss your boo-boos and make them all better.”

“Would you two just be quiet!” Rick Townsend helped his granddad to his feet, leaving me to fend for myself. “Careful, Pops.
It’s slippery.”

“Oh, gee, thanks for the newsflash, ace reporter.” I hauled myself to my feet and did a Michelle Kwan move across the deck,
careful to avoid looking in the direction of the body slumped against the side of the boat. Deputy Doug moved gingerly toward
the corpse, and crouched in front of it.

“You recognize him?” Townsend asked.

“Of course I recognize him. That’s Tattoo Ted. He’s the guy I told you about yesterday. That’s the same guy who threatened
me at Bargain City yesterday and, no, I don’t need to take a closer look to make a positive identification.”

“I was addressing Deputy Samuels,” Townsend snarled, helping his grandfather off the boat and onto the dock. “Are you warm
enough, Pops?” he asked in a tone far removed from the one he’d just used with me.

“I
am
a bit chilled,” Joe whined. He caught my eye and winked.

“I have a blanket in my truck. I’ll be right back.”

I hauled myself over the boat and onto the dock. “Why you old... phony baloney! You’ve been sweating up a storm all night.
I’ll need to put a new pine air freshener in my car to cover up your body odor.”

“Ha! That’s a laugh. Your car smelled like rotting hamburger before I ever stepped foot in it. It ought to be confiscated
by the EPA and crushed!”

“Here, Gramps.” Townsend draped a gray blanket over his grandfather’s shoulders. “Now, do you two mind telling me what the
hell is going on? What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

I stared at my toes. I wasn’t accountable to Rick Townsend. He could grill me ‘til dawn and I wouldn’t tell him a thing. Not
one danged thing.

I pointed at his grandfather. His grandfather pointed at me.

“—He made me do it!”

“—She made me do it!”

I stared, openmouthed, at Joe. “What?”

“Townsend!” Deputy Doug called.

“Yes?” piped up Joe.

“He’s talking to me, Gramps.” Townsend patted his grandfather on the shoulder, gave me a stare that would freeze the devil’s
underwear—if he has any, that is—and moved to converse with the deputy sheriff.

Joe jabbed me in the ribs. “Okay, let’s get our stories straight.”

“What do you mean, get our stories straight? We have to tell the truth, Joe.”

“All of it?”

“Yes, all of it.”

“Even the part about carrying an unregistered, loaded handgun?”

“You can’t mean...”

“The Constitution guarantees us the right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment!”

“This is not the time for a history lesson, pops!” I hissed.

“What are you two whispering about?” Deputy Samuels called out. “You wouldn’t be trying to get your stories worked out, now
would you?”

“See!” I pinched Joe, but got only blanket. “Now he’s suspicious.”

Townsend disembarked and waited for Deputy Samuels. I could tell from their approach that I was not going to like what they
had to say.

“Either of you recognize this?” The deputy dangled a familiar-looking sidearm in front of us.

“My Python! You found my Python!”

I stepped on Gramps’s toe. “You can’t be sure that’s your Python, Mr. Townsend. Why there must be hundreds of them out there.”

“What do you mean? Of course it’s my gun. I’d know my Colt anywhere.” He reached out to take the weapon, but the deputy pulled
it out of his reach.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you touch it, Mr. Townsend,” he said, with no real regret. “You see, sir, this revolver appears to
have been the murder weapon.”

“Murder weapon?”

“That’s right.”

“He’s dead, then?”

“As a doornail,” Townsend, Jr. elaborated.

The deputy nodded. “Body’s still warm, though.”

“We heard a gunshot. Didn’t we, Joe?” I swallowed and looked around. “That means the killer could still be close by.” I shivered,
and Joe put his blanket around both of us.

“I would say it is a very good possibility that the killer is close by.” Deputy Doug gave me a look I didn’t much care for.
“A good possibility.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Didn’t you say the victim was the same guy who threatened you yesterday? The one you made the report on?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you had the apparent murder weapon in your possession at one time?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And you were found at the murder scene. Sounds like motive, opportunity and means to me,” Deputy Doug said.

My teeth began to chatter at what he was suggesting. “You’re forgetting, Deputy. I also have one very upstanding, very pillar-of-the-community
type as my airtight alibi.”

“An upstanding pillar that likes to carry large caliber revolvers,” the deputy pointed out.

“There is another suspect, you know. And she had means and opportunity, and motive.” I glanced at Ranger Rick. “I’m still
working on that one. But, you should talk to her. You should talk to Sheila Palmer.”

“Sheila Palmer? What does she have to do with this?” the deputy asked. I realized in all the excitement I had forgotten all
about the target of our rather ill-advised tail.

“We followed her. From town. That’s why we’re here.”

“Followed her? Why the hell would you follow Sheila Palmer?”

“To find out what she knew about her husband’s disappearance and murder, of course,” I explained, exasperated that they just
didn’t seem to get it. “Listen, I was being treated like a joke by the same people who were sworn to protect me. I was being
threatened by some guy who’d make Vin Diesel think twice. I got a tip that Mrs. Palmer was at her residence,” Joe elbowed
me. I winced, but ignored him. “I followed up on what I thought could be a lead, and here we are. By the way, where is Sheila?
Shouldn’t you be questioning her about her whereabouts, why she is here, why there’s a dead body on her boat, why her husband
was stuffed in the trunk of a car with a hole in his head? Things like that?”

“Sheila Palmer could not have shot your tattooed admirer.” Rick Townsend took a step toward me. I was suddenly uneasy.

“Oh yeah? Why couldn’t she have been the shooter?” I asked, fairly certain I probably wasn’t going to care much for his answer.

“She couldn’t have been the shooter because she was with me,” Townsend said. “She’s been with me since she arrived.”

All kinds of emotions bombarded me upon processing his words. Shock, disillusionment, anger, fear, and, yes, okay, even pain.
It didn’t take a Bill Gates to figure out what the two had been doing, and I didn’t think it was the dispensing of sympathy
to the newly grieving widow.

I tried to appear unaffected by his words. Who Townsend spent his time with had nothing to do with me. Or did it? Suddenly,
I thought about my earlier murder-for-hire scenario. I’d cast Dennis Hamilton, philanderer-at-large, as the other man, who
was therefore implicated in the knock-Peyton-off scheme. It appeared that I might now have to recast that role. Rick Townsend
had joined the cast of characters in my little whodunit.

As a suspect.

A chill rippled over me. Suddenly I was as cold as a Dairee Freeze Arctic Blast. Townsend, Sr. took my hand and we huddled
together.

The sheriff was called out, the state called in. Joe and I sat in his grandson’s pickup and watched the activity increase,
waiting for further instructions.

“Our fingerprints are on the murder weapon, you know,” Joe finally said.

“You don’t have to remind me.”

“If you had let me bring the gun along in the first place, this never would have happened.”

“If you’d left it at home, this never would have happened,” I pointed out. “Or if you had butted out instead of playing some
ridiculous Dirty Harry fantasy.”

The driver’s door was suddenly yanked open and I almost fell out.

“Move over, Turner.” Townsend’s clipped order compelled me to obey without a word. Well, almost without a word.

“Where are we going?” I asked, still reeling from his alibi defense of Sheila Palmer.

“I’m going to take you back to your car. From there, I will follow you into town to the sheriff’s office where the sheriff
would like to have a nice, long chat with you both.”

“Couldn’t it wait until morning?” I am not above whining on occasion, and this occasion called for it. Besides, things always
looked better in the light of day. Though I wasn’t sure if that went for murders, too.

“No, Turner, it can’t wait. Don’t you realize you are now involved in a murder investigation?”

“Hello! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everyone since I found the surprise stiff in my trunk Friday night. No one took
me seriously. Now another person is dead, I’m being threatened, and my pants are so far up my wazoo, they may require surgical
extraction!”

“Why the hell did you get my seventy-five-year-old grandfather—”

“Seventy-four,” Joe interjected.

“—involved in your hare-brained, in-over-your-head, reckless, amateur crime-fighting? How could you be so irresponsible? Oh,
sorry. I lost my head there. I forgot who I was talking to. Irresponsible is your middle name!”

“For your information, Mr. Ranger, sir, your seventy-
four
-year-old grandfather wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. As a matter of fact, up until we ran across the body, he was complaining
about being bored. Besides, we had no way of knowing what we were getting into. How could we? I thought we’d just take a nice,
little drive and be home in bed by midnight.”

“There is no such thing as a nice little anything where you and that wreck of a car are concerned. And you should have been
home in bed.”

With me.

Hold it. Had he said that last part, or had I just imagined it? I stared at him.

His eyes held my gaze. “When you were threatened again, why the hell didn’t you call me?”

Probably because I would have ended up home in bed. With him. And I wasn’t about to make that leap of faith. Not yet. Probably
not ever. It was funny. Not funny, ha ha. Funny, weird. In all the years I’d known and fought with Rick Townsend, I always
knew deep down that I didn’t want to be his enemy, but I always felt it was the safest place to be. Safest in terms of heart-health,
I mean. I knew from day one that if I let this gorgeous man be anything more to me than my brother’s best friend, and mean
anything more to me than a nuisance, I would end up with a mortal chest wound. A cracked aorta. All right, all right, I’ll
say it:
A broken heart
. I may not be the smartest gal in the heartland, but I know trouble looking for a place to happen, and Rick Townsend had
TRESSA’S HEARTACHE
written all over him.

“I couldn’t call,” I said, truthfully. “I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me again.”

“You have to learn to trust me, Tressa, but you have to do that on your own.”

This from a guy who’d just admitted he was playing the Skipper to our first murder victim’s wife’s Ginger. I wondered if he
was aware of how fast my heart was beating, how shallow my breathing had become, how much I longed to reach over and push
that dark, errant lock back and plant a lip-lock on him that would erase all my doubts and fears, and dare me to dream.

But, of course, I didn’t touch his hair or kiss his mouth. Real life wasn’t a romance novel where the characters took chances
on love and were always rewarded in the end for their heart-of-a-gambler ways. I feared I was like those swans—or is it pelicans—who
mate for life. Yes, I know, in today’s disposable world where folks take new lovers as often as I buy a pair of shoes, and
discard them just as quickly, and prenuptial agreements are drafted more often than wills, that sounds really corny. But I
really think, for me at least, life in the fast lane of love would result in a crash-and-burn extravaganza worthy of those
TV shows featuring death and destruction.

“How come it’s grown so quiet over there?” I’d forgotten Joe was even in the truck cab. “A bit ago you were ripping into each
other. What happened?”