Irish Eyes (9 page)

“See?” I said. “Now will you listen to me? I talked to one of the paramedics at Grady last night. He’s in the Shamrocks. He marched in the parade with Bucky yesterday. His name’s McNabb.”

“Jimmy McNabb,” C.W. said. “I know him.”

“McNabb said Bucky only joined because Lisa Dugan is in it. You know how Bucky is. He never joins anything. He just did it because she wanted him to. What you boys call pussy-whipped, I guess.”

He let that slide. “You ever meet this girlfriend?”

“Met her for the first time this morning. I don’t think we’re going to be best friends.”

“I’ve heard about her. What’s she like?” C.W. asked. “Never known Deavers to date a cop before.”

“She’s nothing like any of his other girls,” I said. “Older. Smarter. I gather she has a kid. Very professional-acting. A career gal, I’d say. She has an accent, not Southern. And definitely not from around here.”

“Yet she made captain. And in homicide,” C.W. mused. “She went very far, very fast.”

“That occurred to me too,” I said. “Does Linda know her?”

“Not really,” he said. “Linda told me about Lisa Dugan when she got the promotion. She says this woman doesn’t hang with the other gals. Keeps herself to herself.”

“But she joined the Shamrock Society. Doesn’t seem to fit.”

“Maybe she likes green,” C.W. said.

We went back to the hospital after lunch. Maureen’s buddy Veneta was on the phone when we walked up. She put her hand over the receiver.

“Your friend’s been moved upstairs,” she said. “That’s the only news I have. His pulse and heart rate are steady. He’s still on the respirator.”

She saw the look of disappointment on my face, and gave me a sad smile.

“You know the story, don’t you?”

“Story?”

“He’s not going to wake up,” Veneta said gently. “It’s sad, but it’s true. We try to tell families that, but nobody wants to believe it. They always want to believe in miracles.”

I bit my lip. “A miracle wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

When I left the hospital, I ran to the parking lot, dodging greasy rain puddles. I started the van, couldn’t think what to do next. The Varsity hamburger sat like a rock on my gut. The burger wasn’t the only thing upsetting me. C.W. had me all confused, and now they were saying Bucky wouldn’t make it, no matter what.

It occurred to me that maybe some good hard physical labor would be in order.

I called Edna from my cell phone. “Everything cool at your end?”

“Everything’s a disaster at my end,” Edna said. “You won’t believe where Neva Jean is.”

“Not at Bettye Bond’s?”

“I wish,” Edna said fervently.

“How about Betty Ford’s?”

“They don’t put people in rehab for drinking Mountain Dew,” Edna said tartly. “But you were close. She’s in jail.”

“What jail? What did she do? What did Swannelle do?”

Swannelle is Neva Jean’s husband. Where goest Neva Jean, goest Swannelle, and unfortunately for us, where goest Swannelle goest a shitload of trouble.

“They’re down in Hapeville,” Edna said. “I didn’t get all the particulars. But it was Swannelle that called, and he wasn’t in jail, so I guess it was just Neva Jean that got arrested. There was some trouble at a bar they were at. Mulroney’s, or something like that. Anyway, he wanted me to go to the bank and get some money to bail Neva Jean out, but I can’t go, because I’ve still got Maura.”

“I see. Does that mean I need to get down to Hapeville?”

“I believe I would,” Edna said. “Let me know what happens.”

S
wannelle McCoomb is a scrawny guy, 120 pounds of grease and grit. Neva Jean calls him “a lover, not a fighter.” But you don’t want to get him riled up. He was riled up now.

His face kept getting redder and his high-pitched voice kept getting louder as he leaned farther across the desk to make his point to the clerk sitting behind it. His thinning brown hair was sprinkled with green glitter and brushed back from his forehead in his trademark Conway Twitty pompadour with the Elvis Presley ducktail in the back. He wore a kellygreen sweatshirt that said “I’m Irish—Kiss My Grits.” His pants bagged in the seat and were cut off at the knees, where they were met by bright orange wool socks. He wore green shoes that turned up at the toes with little bells that jingled when he stomped his foot, which he was doing right now. He was the man of every woman’s dreams—at least in his own mind.

“I done tol’ you,” he hollered, “my wife is gonna lose her job if you don’t let her out of there right this minute. Now, lemme see the police chief or somebody can tell me something right.”

“Swannelle?” I put my hand on his shoulder. He wheeled around and had his fist cocked, ready to take a swing at me. Instead, he grinned broadly when he saw who it was.

“Hey, Callahan,” he said, grabbing my arm. “You wanna tell this heifer ‘bout the mistake they made arresting my wife?” He jerked his thumb in my direction. “This here’s a private investigator we’ve put on retainer until we get this mess straightened out.”

I felt my face burning. “Uh, Swannelle, why don’t we just get Neva Jean’s fine paid and then we can discuss this later?”

“Fine?” he squawked. “Why are we gonna pay these Mickey Mouse Keystone Kops a fine for false arrest of my innocent wife?”

The clerk, a sixtyish white woman with dyed black Mamie Eisenhower bangs, sat back in her chair and gave Swannelle a deadpan look that said she’d seen and heard it all, and none of it made the slightest bit of difference to her.

“How much is the fine?” I asked, unzipping my pocketbook.

She looked down at the sheet of paper in front of her. “Let’s see, public indecency, that’s two hundred dollars. Destruction of property comes to another two hundred thirty dollars, according to the complainant.”

“Two hundred and thirty dollars?” Swannelle hollered. “For what? A couple of cheap pictures and a lamp the Salvation Army wouldn’t take?”

The clerk didn’t blink. “They got it all wrote down right here. Tiffany lamp, seventy-five dollars; glassware, fifty dollars; commode, seventy-five dollars; mirror, thirty dollars.”

“That commode wasn’t worth no seventy-five dollars,” Swannelle said, slapping his hand on the counter. “It didn’t even flush. And it was not my wife’s fault that lamp got broke. She wasn’t even aimin’ for the lamp.”

I counted out the bills, put them on the counter, pushed them across to the clerk, who didn’t bat an eye. She recounted the money, wrote out a receipt, and handed it back across to me. She turned around, opened a drawer in a cabinet behind me, and handed across a manila envelope.

“That’s the suspect’s personal belongings,” the clerk said. “Inventory is on the front of the envelope. Wedding ring, keys, Swiss Army knife, mace, tear gas spray, and a wallet containing eleven dollars and forty-two cents. The officer confiscated the brass knuckles and the nunchucks. They’re illegal in this county.”

Swannelle grabbed the envelope and tore it open. “I wanna see that ring. Make sure they didn’t swap Neva Jean’s diamond for some hunk of glass.” He looked up, gave the clerk the fisheye. “That’s a flawless eighth of a karat pink diamond in that ring. Nobody better have tried the old swap-arooney.”

He held the ring up to the light, examined it, gave the clerk another fish-eye, then put it in his pocket.

The clerk picked up the phone, punched an extension, told somebody, “Mrs. McCoomb can be released now.”

He started to say something, but just then the door opened and a uniformed police officer brought Neva Jean into the lobby.

“Swannelle?” Neva Jean fell into his arms, covering him with kisses. He wrapped his arms around her, or as much of her as his arms could get around, and patted her hair, which had streaks of green and orange in it and stood out like some sort of oversized bird’s nest.

She was dressed in a faded blue jumpsuit that had “Hapeville City Jail” stenciled across the back and she was sobbing and had thick black streaks of mascara running down her face. It was a deeply touching moment.

“Are you okay, muffin?” Swannelle asked tenderly. “They didn’t work you over with no hoses or nothin’, did they?”

“It w-a-as aw-haw-ful,” Neva Jean wailed, hiccuping between syllables. “They didn’t have no cable or nothin’.”

Swannelle’s face got hard. He stomped over to the counter. “My attorney will be in touch with you people. In the meantime, you people better be thinking about a little matter we call false arrest.”

Edna poured a can of Mountain Dew over a glass of ice and handed it to Neva Jean.

“Nice and slow now, Neva Jean,” she instructed. “Tell us what happened last night.”

Neva Jean took a long slurp of Mountain Dew. We’d gotten her cleaned up a little, and most of the green hair dye was gone, but she still didn’t look like anything you’d want to meet in a back alley.

Neva Jean might look like a two-dollar trailer tramp, but, as Edna often reminded me, she has a heart of gold. Or maybe it was brass. She was our first employee, had actually come with the House Mouse, like the original pink Chevy van and our first client list. She was unpredictable, unreliable, and unbeatable when you finally got her down to cleaning houses.

“We heard on the radio, Y106—y’all ever listen to Rhubarb Jones?—that they was having a contest down at Mulroney’s in Hapeville, for St. Patrick’s Day. The person who pulled the craziest stunt to get Rhubarb’s attention would win a thousand bucks, plus two front-row tickets to see Hank Williams, Jr. And you know how Swannelle is about Hank Williams, Jr.”

Edna rolled her eyes. We knew.

“So Swannelle had one of his most fabulous ideas ever. He says, ‘Hon? We gonna get me up like a leprechaun, and you gonna be my little pot o’ gold?’ Get it? pot o’ gold? You would not believe how hard that man worked on those costumes. I had no idea he was that good with a glue gun and a can of spray paint. We took pictures, too.” She reached for her suitcase-sized pocketbook. “Y’all wanna see?”

“Maybe later,” I said. “I for one would like to hear how a leprechaun and his pot o’ gold manage to get themselves arrested for public indecency and destruction of property.”

Neva Jean sniffed. “I didn’t want to hurt Swannelle’s feelings, after he worked so hard on the costumes and all, but after he got done with my pot o’ gold costume, and we got me into it, I realized he’d forgotten something important. Being a man, it wasn’t something he’d take into consideration.”

“A trap door?” Edna is wise in many ways of the world.

She nodded. “It wouldn’t have been so bad, but we got to the bar, and I was feeling funny, wearing that big old nail keg sprayed gold and it was kinda short—me being a full-figured
gal and all. So I was drinking that green beer pretty good to get over my shyness. And they was lining up all the contestants, so Rhubarb could get a good look at us all, just as soon as he got there. And that’s when the trouble started.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“There was this woman—I don’t know what she was supposed to be, unless maybe it was a green Marilyn Monroe. I mean, she was all green—green hair, green face, green legs, and big old green titties spillin’ out of that slutty dress of hers. And she kept rubbin’ up against Swannelle, putting her hands on him, askin’ him did he wanna kiss her Blarney stone. The way women always want to do.”

“It’s a terrible problem for Swannelle, all that animal magnetism,” Edna said.

“And I was getting pretty mad about it,” said Neva Jean. “I mean, I’m standing right there. And then this drunk at the bar, he kept picking my gold coins and eatin’ ‘em.”

“Some guy was eating your gold coins?” I asked. I had no idea the bar scene by the airport was so kinky.

“They were foil-wrapped chocolates,” Neva Jean explained. “The kind Jewish kids get for Hanukkah. It was the only kind Swannelle could find at the Buy-Rite on such short notice. Anyway, this fella was runnin’ my costume, so I asked him real nice to stop, only he wouldn’t. And you know me, I don’t like to make a scene, so I told Swannelle, ‘Watch my beer. I’m going to the bathroom.’”

“This is gonna be the part where we get to the public indecency, I bet,” I told Edna.

She looked at her watch. “I hope so. It’s almost two o’clock. My stories are fixin’ to come on TV pretty soon.”

“I had to pee real bad,” Neva Jean explained. “But there was a long line outside the ladies’ room. And even though I explained real nice about how I was in a hurry and I didn’t wanna miss Rhubarb Jones’s judging, none of them bitches would let me cut in line. And by now, my eyeballs are floating in green beer. So I hollered over to Swannelle, come help me.”

“And did he?” Edna asked.

Neva Jean sighed. “There wasn’t nobody in line for the
men’s room. He pointed that out right away. So he says, ‘Hon, you go on in there and go. Nobody cares.’ But the lock was broke. So he goes, ‘Hon, I’ll stand out here and guard the door, and you go on in there and get out of that nail keg.’

“So I did,” Neva Jean said. “But I was having a heck of a time gettin, out of it. Me bein’ so full-figured and all. Finally I got it off, and I’m standing in that men’s room, trying to figure out what to do about the urinal, and then I hear a lot of yellin’ and hollerin’ outside the door. And Swannelle, he’s yellin’, ‘Come on, Neva Jean, Rhubarb’s here and we’re gonna miss the judging.’ And the next thing the door opens, and some big old guy is staring at me—me standing there in my green panties and not much else.”

“I thought Swannelle was guarding the door,” Edna said.

“He was, but this guy was bigger then he was, and I guess he really had to go. He got me by the hand and pushed me right out of that bathroom, me in my panties and green hair.”

“Into the bar?” Edna asked.

“I told you this was where the public indecency part came in,” I said.

“It coulda been worse,” Neva Jean said, “but hardly anybody was paying attention to me by then, because Rhubarb Jones was there, and he was beginning to judge the contest. Only my pot o’ gold was in the men’s room. And Swannelle was so set on winning that contest …”

Edna looked at her watch again and sighed. “I’m missing
As the World Churns.”

“Cut to the chase, Neva Jean,” I urged.