Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (8 page)

It was dark outside when we closed the last trunk. As he got into his car, Les gave me the strained smile of someone who did not suffer fools gladly, especially ones who ruined his chances for a pitcher of beer before he had to go home for supper.

For the record, we found no towels or sheets monogrammed with A.W. Or the body of an old woman. I wiped my hands on a napkin from the floor of my car, put the handkerchief in the glove compartment, and began to compose a written report that would make a helluva dull screenplay. Coming soon to a theater near you: The Handkerchief firom Hell.

Matt stood behind Lillian and kneaded her shoulders, then bent down and let his lips tickle her ear as he said, “After we get divorced, you’ll still be my agent and manager and get to see me all the time, and we can still make love whenever you want. Hey, we can do it right now on the sofa if it’ll help you change your mind. I got a few minutes till I go to the studio.”

She pushed him away, wondering what on earth was wrong with herself. Something obscurely ingrained and riddled with ghastly Freudian complexities, she supposed, although her family had been as healthy as the Cleavers. “I’d take you up on your charming offer, Matt, but I need to make calls. No matter what happens, I will indeed remain your agent and manager for at least four more years because you signed a contract. Right now I take ten percent of the gross as your agent and twenty percent as your manager, leaving you seventy percent to pay court fines. If you file for divorce against my wishes, I’ll come back like a starving polecat and end up with alimony equal to half your net income. Seventy divided by two doesn’t leave you much, Matt, especially when Uncle Sam’s relying on you to help reduce the deficit. Katie’s under contract to my agency, too, and I can make sure she never does anything more than two-bit county fairs and mall openings until she hits bottom within a year or two. Hillbilly singers seem to biodegrade biodegrade pretty quickly in this town. Are you and Katie going to live on love?”

Matt snatched up his guitar case and stormed out of Lillian’s private office and into her secretary’s room, where he promptly stumbled over the outstretched legs of a shabbily dressed man with a beard.

“Hey,” the man said, “aren’t you …?”

Matt got to his feet and jammed his hat back on his head. “It don’t matter who I am.”

“You’re Matt Montana,” he continued, beaming. “My name’s Charlie, and we’ve got something in common, you know.”

“The only thing we got in common, Charlie, is that we both fucked your sister.”

Lillian’s secretary gripped the armrests of her chair and said, “Have yourself a nice day, Mr. Montana.”

Matt did not reply, nor did he follow her suggestion. By the time he reached the sleaziest redneck bar in the county, he’d received one ticket for reckless driving and avoided another one only because the police officer was an unpublished songwriter and just happened to have a copy of “Nightcrawler Woman” in his glove compartment.

Mrs. Twayblade tilted her head like a chicken within pecking proximity of a worm, her sharp nose and piercing eyes reinforcing the image, as did the clipboard clutched under her arm like a wing. “Adele Wockermann did not wander away in a daze. She made a cunning effort to keep us from realizing she’d slipped away.”

I sighed. “What if her friends on the far side of the moon suggested the plan and told her to wait for them down by the creek? The banks are slippery and the water’s icy.”

“Her ridiculous stories served her well. They gave her an excuse to avoid civilized interaction with the other residents and cut short unwanted visits. Whenever her hearing aid was supposedly tuned in to this extraterrestrial radio station, she refused to join in a game of canasta or even participate in the little crafts projects that Patty May arranged. Adele was the only resident who did not spend a pleasant afternoon making turkeys out of pinecones and construction paper for our Thanksgiving table decorations.”

“Hard to believe she’d skip that,” I said, “but we still have to find her.”

Her pinfeathers bristled. “No, Chief Hanks, you still have to find her. I have to start filling out paperwork for the Department of Human Services. As far as I’m concerned, we have an unfilled bed.”

A woman with wisps of yellow hair came to the doorway. “There’s a cop car out front. They finally coming to take you away, Mrs. Twayblade?”

I went out to the porch. The officer opened the passenger door to let out a German shepherd of indeterminate rank, and they came up the steps.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, squinting at her name tag. “Hope this isn’t interrupting your dinner, Officer McNair. Yours and …?”

“Larry’s. No, he’s always ready to go for a drive, and he knows we’ll stop for a sundae on the way back if he does a good job.”

McNair was brisk but not brusque. She asked a few questions, tugged Larry’s leash, and we went down the corridor to the end room. Doors along the way popped open, and comments, some delighted and some apprehensive, wafted in our wake. I opened the closet door and gestured at the clothes. “These belong to Mrs. Wockermann.”

McNair encouraged Larry to take the scent. The dog galloped out the door, his feet skidding and his toenails clicking on the vinyl floor. After a few circles, however, he sprawled on his haunches and looked expectantly at McNair, who looked at me and said, “He can’t pick out the most recent trail.”

“Let’s try the exit,” I said, holding open the metal door.

Larry seemed to think this was a splendid idea. Rumbling in his throat, he bounded into the parking lot, hesitated only a moment, and then took off like a canine backhoe. McNair and I smiled at each other as we followed along for fifteen feet. We frowned at each other as Larry tried a few different directions, stopped rumbling and wagging his tail, and sat down with an air of certainty that foreboded ill.

McNair shrugged. “She must have gotten in a vehicle. Let’s be thankful she didn’t leave a trail that led us to the woods. She wouldn’t have survived long.”

I thanked both of them, then went inside to find Mrs. Twayblade, who was attempting to put down a rebellion of sorts in the corridor. Once she persuaded all the women to close their doors, she led me to the lounge.

“Did that slobbering animal find anything?” she demanded.

I suppose I should have defended Larry’s maligned salivary glands, but I let it go. “Mrs. Wockermann seems to have gone out the emergency exit and gotten into a car. Did you notice anyone parked out there between noon and two o’clock?”

“I was busy in the dining room, and once the meal was finished, I came out to the desk to do some paperwork. I can’t see anything on that side of the house. Neither can any of the residents in that wing.”

“What about Patty May and the other aide?”

“Their shift ended at four. Since we now know that Adele did not stagger off to drown herself in a pond, I see no reason to continue this investigation tonight. You may speak to the girls tomorrow morning. Shall we say ten o’clock, Chief Hanks?”

I could think of a lot of other things to say, but I needed her cooperation and she did have a valid point. I said, “Good night.”

Mrs. Jim Bob came out to the porch of what had been the hardware store and inspected her husband’s handiwork. “It’s crooked. First it was tilted to the left, and now it’s tilted to the right. I really don’t have time to stand out here all afternoon while you play with the sign like it was a teeter-totter.”

Jim Bob sat on the top of the ladder, slapping the hammer against the palm of his hand and doing his level best to keep his temper, even though he knew he looked like a damn turkey buzzard perched on a rickety roost. For one thing, it never did one bit of good to argue with her when she was hell-bent on some fool thing. For another, he had hopes that her venture would succeed so that he could hire an assistant manager at the SuperSaver and get in some serious deer hunting.

“Lookin’ mighty fine, Sister Barbara!” boomed Brother Verber from the edge of the road. He wore a pale blue suit, a pink-and-blue plaid shirt with silver-rimmed snaps, and high-heeled boots that the salesman had assured him looked exactly like real leather. His cowboy hat was adorned with medallions on the band and a spray of small feathers. It was all he could do not to preen in his fine new clothes, but he reminded himself of his Christian commitment to humility. “Mighty fine, indeed! The tourists are gonna be thrilled at the chance to come browse in ‘The Official Matt Montana Montana Souvenir Shoppe.’ Why, it’s all I can do to bide my time until the grand opening!”

She nodded at Brother Verber, wondering why he was dressed up like the host of a cable cartoon show. “I trust you’ll be on hand to offer the benediction,” she called. “I’ll take comfort in knowing the Good Lord has seen fit to bless my little shoppe and to guide me through the pitfalls of the retail business. I’ll make sure to express my gratitude in the offering plate.”

“Praise the Lord!” replied Brother Verber, still booming away on this crisp and crackly November morning. “Everybody in town should be following your upstanding Christian example. Don’t you agree, Brother Jim Bob? Wouldn’t the world be a kinder and gentler place if we all followed Sister Barbara’s example?”

Jim Bob suspected the world would be a damn sight quieter place if he bounced the hammer off the preacher’s forehead, but he figured he was in enough hot water as it was. “Listen, Mrs. Jim Bob, I can’t tell from up here if the sign’s straight or not. Why doncha move out that way and tell me when I got it right?”

“I’d have to move to Oklahoma before you got anything right,” she muttered loudly enough for him to hear as she went out to the gravel parking lot, crossed her arms, and squinted up at the sign. “The right side needs to go up … up, I said … no, that’s too far. No, that’s too far the other way. I swear, I’d climb up on that ladder and do it myself if I didn’t have more important things to do.”

Jim Bob didn’t point out that he had more important things to do hisself, one of them involving an hour at Malva’s trailer on account of her husband being out of town. He was getting real fond of her rabbity little eyes, those and other parts of her anatomy. In the aftermath of lustful abandon, he’d promised to promote her to assistant manager, but of course he wouldn’t because she was a woman. This wasn’t to say some woman didn’t have a head for figures. Mrs. Jim Bob could say down to the last cent what the coffee mugs cost wholesale and how much sales tax to tack onto the dish towels featuring a sanitized depiction of the Wockermann homestead. She’d badgered the delivery company into cutting her a cheaper rate and talked the printer into doing the sing-along songbooks in record time.

She’d scheduled half the high school girls in town into parttime jobs to avoid workman’s comp and payroll taxes.

And now she was bitching at him. He wiggled the sign up and down until she jabbed her finger and told him not to let it move so much as an inch while he nailed it firm.

“Did you hear about Adele?” Brother Verber asked her.

“Yes, but from what I heard yesterday evening, she just got in somebody’s car and left. My best guess is that some distant cousin popped up out of the blue and took Adele home for a cozy little visit before Christmas. Since she’s not dead, I don’t see why Arly can’t have her back in plenty of time.”

Brother Verber was relieved to learn everything was under control. “Me neither,” he said emphatically.

She went back up to the porch and looked up at Jim Bob, grimly thinking to herself that she’d never once looked up to him and couldn’t imagine doing so in the foreseeable future. “Put the ladder away and come inside to start on the shelves. I need to poke Perkins’s eldest into getting off her lazy rear to help me assemble and dress the mannequin that’s going in the front window. Tourists will be standing in line to pay five dollars and have their photographs taken with—”

The door closed on whatever else she said. Jim Bob crawled down the ladder, tossed the hammer in his toolbox, and assessed his chances of just sort of fading away to his truck, where he had a nice bottle of bourbon under the seat and a heart-shaped box of candy in the glove compartment. His wife was safely out of sight, but for some fool reason Brother Verber was still standing by the road, twiddling his thumbs and grinning mindlessly at the facade of the souvenir shoppe. “How’s it going?” Jim Bob said as he dropped the toolbox into the bed of the truck.

“Just fine, Brother Jim Bob. Sister Barbara has ordered the postcards and racks for the vestibule in exchange for a percentage of the profits, and she’s working on a little booklet that explains the history of the church and has a letter from Brother Hucklebee telling all about the sunny Sabbath morning when he baptized baby Matt Montana. Well, it would have been from Brother Hucklebee if he hadn’t upped and died a few years back.” He wiped away a tear as he gazed reverently at the perfectly aligned sign above the door of the shoppe. “We all owe Sister Barbara our undyin’ gratitude for what she’s done for Maggody.”

“Okay with me,” Jim Bob said as he eased into the front seat of the truck and closed the door as quietly as he could, his lips aching as he imagined Malva’s kisses.

Brother Verber loomed in the window. “Our undyin’ gratitude, like I said. I may just put that on a portable sign in front of the Assembly Hall. The week the tourists start coming, I thought I’d put up something along the lines of ‘This Is It! Your First Stop on the Highway to Heaven.’ Then I got to thinking about it and I wasn’t so sure.” He stuck his head into the truck, warming Jim Bob’s face with exhalations of peppermint. “I don’t want people to think they’ll die because they visit the Assembly Hall and purchase mementos of the occasion. Whatta you think, Brother Jim Bob?”

“I think you should pray over it,” Jim Bob replied piously, “and it’s not a minute too soon to start. I’m sure the Good Lord has advertising executives on retainer. Maybe not sitting on that heavenly throne in the sky, but there’s gotta be at least one somewhere this side of the fiery furnaces of hell.”

Brother Verber indignantly withdrew his head. “That’s edging toward blasphemy, and blasphemy’s the first step down the path of wickedness.” Despite his brand-new trousers, he fell to his knees in the dusty gravel and clasped his hands tightly. ” ‘Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.’ Guilty of death! Is that what you want, Brother Jim Bob?”