A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (6 page)

“Well, why d’you call him
that
?” Chrissy asked the carpet. Clearly, she was no student of conversational subtext.

Stella sighed. “Now, hon, why don’t we just lay this whole names business to rest. We got plenty else to talk about here.”

“No, Miss, I don’t mind answering,” Goat said, but he kept his gaze trained steady on Stella, and by the wicked sparkle in his eyes Stella could tell she’d managed to get his ire up. Smart, she chided herself, way to provoke the law when she needed him most. “See, when I got divorced, my first wife saw fit to tell everyone that the problem was that I’m as randy as a—”

“Stop right there,” Stella snapped. Chrissy might be one of the dimmer bulbs in a family that wasn’t lit up bright with smarts to start with, but Stella didn’t think it was right to take advantage of her gullible nature with any sort of teasing. Not to mention the terrible day the poor girl was having. “It’s just that the sheriff has been stubborn from the day he was born. It was his own mama who gave him that nickname.”

“What kind of stubborn?” Chrissy asked, darting shy little glances in the man’s direction.
Her
mama had obviously not gotten around to teaching her that it wasn’t polite to talk about people right in front of them as though they weren’t there.

“Well, the wrong kind, of course. Like a goat. You ever try to lead one around? Wherever you try to drag it, the goat figures it wants to be headed the other way.”

“Oh. I see.” Chrissy nodded. “Well, Sheriff, I imagine I’ll just call you ‘Sheriff Jones,’ if it’s all the same to you.”

“That’d be just fine, Miss.”

After that there was a brief silence while Stella’s two guests stole polite glances at each other.

“Chrissy’s husband, Roy Dean, has run off,” Stella said. Time to get down to business. “He’s been gone since yesterday morning. And he took little Tucker with him.”

“Who’s Tucker?” Goat asked.

At that, Chrissy’s features, which had been schooled into her best approximation of mindful interest, melted into a blubbery puddle. Stella handed her the box of Kleenex she kept at the ready on the side table next to the couch; smacked-around wives often found it came in handy. “Tucker’s my little baby boy,” she wailed. “He’s not even two years old yet.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s only been one day—”

“And Tucker ain’t even his!” Chrissy continued to sniffle. “Roy Dean never paid that child any mind before. I don’t know why he’d want to go and run off with him!”

Goat looked at Stella, eyebrows raised.

“Chrissy was married before,” she explained. “To Pitt Akers, from the Akers over up south of Sedalia.”

“But
he
wasn’t the father either,” Chrissy cut in, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. She was getting herself under control a little.

“No?” Goat asked politely. “I think I might ought to start noting some of this down.” He pulled out a little notebook and flipped to a fresh page. “Now, whose boy is your Tucker?”

“Well, I’m not
entirely
sure, see, because that was right about when I broke up with the fella I’d been seeing after Pitt and I split up, and there was this one night out at my cousin’s—”

Goat held up a palm to stop her. “I guess I don’t need to know that,” he said.

“What Tucker is, is a child from a previous relationship,” Stella clarified, hoping to save Chrissy a little embarrassment.

“That’s right,” Chrissy said, nodding. “That’s exactly what he is.”

“Now, had your husband been talking about taking any trips, going to visit kin, anything like that?”

“Oh, no sir, Roy Dean’s not one for a lot of visiting. And his folks are all around here.”

That was an understatement; Shaws were firmly rooted in Prosper. Some of them probably hadn’t left Sawyer County in
years. Roy Dean’s daddy had a painting business he’d got from his own daddy, and now Roy Dean and his brother Arthur were on the books. Tucker, if Roy Dean’d taken more of a shine to the boy, could have looked forward to a painting career himself.

“Was there anybody he had a beef with?”

Chrissy shot Stella a wide-eyed glance, no doubt wondering if she herself counted. Stella gave her a tiny little shake of the head, hoping the girl would have the sense not to talk about the problems between her and Roy Dean. Assuming Roy Dean turned up, and Chrissy had the need to take care of him in some manner or other down the road, it wouldn’t do for the sheriff to know too much about their relationship.

“Um, no,” Chrissy said. “I mean, yes, he got into a fight now and then. He’s kind of quick-tempered, I guess you’d say.”

“Who’s he fight with?”

“Well, just whoever’s there when the mood comes on, I guess. I mean it’s usually somebody says something Roy Dean don’t like, when he’s been drinkin’ too much. Ain’t that usually how it goes?”

“Can you give me a for-instance?” Goat sat with his pen poised and ready to go, but he hadn’t written much yet. So far this wasn’t a terribly unique tale that Chrissy was telling.

Despite its name, Prosper was not a place where people lived extravagant lives. Times had gotten hard in the eighties, and not improved much since. Besides farming, there was the pork-processing plant, and a sad little office park that had never been fully occupied. The businesses ran along the shabby side of legitimate. There was a used-office-furniture dealer, the
headquarters of a regional fried-chicken chain, an outfit that installed prefab sheds in people’s backyards, so they had somewhere to put all the junk that didn’t fit in the garage.

Prosper had developed an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, of cynicism, that Stella didn’t remember from her own childhood there. Fifty years ago, when she was born, rural Missouri still strove to live up to the wholesome ideals generated by the postwar era. Men like her father worked hard to buy a house, to get ahead. The American Legion hall and a few of the local churches had been built by volunteers during that era of civic responsibility. As Stella and her sister attended Prosper Elementary and played in the streets and parks and back yards of town, the world seemed like a safe and orderly place. Sure, Prosper had its town drunk, its ne’er-do-wells, its hard cases, but they routinely got their clocks fixed by Sheriff Knoll: after a lecture and a couple nights in the lockup, sheepish spells of better behavior nearly always followed.

Nowadays the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys was a lot blurrier, and it wasn’t clear to Stella who was winning. She was almost tempted to feel sorry for Goat and his crew; she knew that they spent most of their time on patrol and traffic stops and trying to keep a lid on all the problems at the high school, a job that Stella figured parents ought to be helping out with. Sawyer County didn’t extend down to the lake, so they were spared the job of patrolling the shore, but they got the traffic heading home, often drunk, frequently rowdy, and sometimes belligerent.

And with the mountains of procedural requirements in place these days, Goat and Ian and Mike didn’t have the freedom to police the town the way they saw fit, as Burt Knoll
had once done. Hell, they probably spent half their time doing paperwork.

It was a wonder Goat had never been tempted to go freelance himself, like she had.

“Well, Roy Dean likes go to BJ’s after work some days,” Chrissy said. “Him and Arthur and them all. Sometimes things get a little out of hand.”

Goat wrote a few words down. “Bar fights, then,” he said. “Anything lately?”

Chrissy shifted uncomfortably in her chair. A pale band of flesh muffined up over her shorts, her lively top not quite up to the task of covering it, and Chrissy tugged at the fabric ineffectively. “Well, maybe,” she said. “A couple weeks ago he came home scraped up some.”

“How so?”

“Well, a little worse’n some, not as bad as other times.”

“I mean, what was the nature of Roy Dean’s injuries?”

“Oh. One of his eyes was swoll up so he could hardly see out of it, and he got hit in the other one too, but not as bad—it didn’t bruise up until the next day. He did something to his arm where he couldn’t lift it up past his shoulder for a while. He was favoring it, said it hurt to lift anything. Oh, and he thought he was gonna lose one of his teeth. It went kind of loose on him, but you know, that seemed to take care of itself. And of course he was cut up here and there, not bad enough for stitches or anything.”

“So a pretty good dustup, then,” the sheriff said.

“Well, not the worst ever, but bad enough, I guess.”

“And you don’t have any idea who it was he got into it with?”

“No sir. Roy Dean don’t like to talk about that kind of thing much. He just makes light of it. I put Bactine on ’im, gauze and bandages. Put some steak on his eyes, raw, you know, have him lay down and that helps.”

What a fool waste of meat, Stella thought. But at least Chrissy was answering the sheriff’s questions without mumbling too much—and without giving too much away about her marital problems. But if Goat had any sense, he’d be on his way to figuring out that part.

“You know men,” she interjected, joining the conversation in an effort to distract him. “They don’t have much to say when they’re on the receiving end of a beating.”

Oops.

Stella clamped her mouth shut, but the unfortunate remark had slipped out. Goat turned to her and gave her a long, searching look. She had to work hard not to fidget. It was like those blue eyes sent out some sort of low-level laser beam that burned right through her skin.

“Is that right,” he said mildly.

Stella had a thought that she’d had before, and not a very comfortable one. At times it seemed as if Goat suspected a little too much about her sideline business. The sewing machine shop provided as much cover as she ought to need: Stella was there every Monday and Wednesday through Saturday, nine to six; Sunday and Tuesday were her days off, and then she made sure that folks saw her doing errands around town.

Her other business was the sort of thing that could be conducted in the evenings.
Late
evenings, if need be, which was often the case. Besides, it was word of mouth only—and her
clients were very, very discreet. They passed her name along only to their most trusted—and desperate—friends. After all, they had as much reason to keep things quiet as she did. More, most of them.

“So I hear,” she said, cool as she could. She felt little prickles of sweat pop along her hairline but resisted the urge to wipe them away. Fussing like that was a good way to signal you were thinking something you didn’t want to let on—Stella had learned that from the online course.

“What about when men are the ones dishing it out?” Goat asked. Same steady gaze.

Stella shrugged. “Wouldn’t know.”

She looked straight at him and carefully blinked twice while she told this whopper of a lie. That same criminology course had advised that people who didn’t blink at all might be lying, concentrating a little too hard at looking you in the face.

Although this might be a pointless lie. It wasn’t exactly an iron-clad secret that Ollie had taken out his frustrations on her for the better part of her marriage. Neighbors heard sounds coming from the house, friends noticed the bruises, and even the most taciturn talked eventually.

Of course, lots of folks had talked when Stella went up in front of the judge, back when Goat was still just a deputy sheriff all the way over in Sedalia, and it was Burt Knoll who had answered a call from the neighbors and found Stella sitting in this very living room next to the body of her husband, wrench still in her hand.

Every person in town knew that Ollie was a wife beater, and plenty of them were prepared to say that he’d always been
a cowardly bully, as well. The judge finally had to turn away the flood of would-be character witnesses who’d swear they’d seen Ollie kick a dog or backhand Stella in the car as they pulled out of the church lot after Sunday services. The judge did allow several to testify they’d clearly heard Ollie threaten to kill his wife.

But Stella was willing to bet that Goat didn’t know everything. One of the holy commandments of small-town living was that newcomers weren’t privy to local gossip, even if it was acknowledged truth. So he probably had to do a little guesswork to fill in the gaps. For all Stella knew, he was still wondering why old Judge Ligett had dismissed the case and sent her home in time for
Jeopardy.

“All right then.” Goat turned back to Chrissy. “Can you give me the exact date of this fight?”

Chrissy thought about it for a few moments. “No, I can’t,” she said apologetically. “It was probably a Friday, ’cause Roy Dean does his more serious drinking on Fridays, and I guess it was probably in April, but I don’t know beyond that.”

“Well now, Easter was, let’s see, I believe it was on April twelfth. Was it before Easter or after? You remember that?”

Chrissy put on a look of tremendous concentration, pinching her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger. “Well . . . we went to Easter dinner at Roy Dean’s folks’ place and I don’t remember him being busted up in the face then, so I guess it must have been after.”

“So that leaves, uh, Friday the twenty-fourth, and then you’re into May. May first’s a Friday. You think it was the twenty-fourth?”

More thinking. Chrissy’s brow wrinkled with intense concentration. “Oh, Sheriff, I just don’t know. I’m sorry, sir.”

Goat reached over and patted her knee awkwardly. “That’s all right, hon,” he said gently.

Stella noticed the gesture with surprise. Goat was hardly a warm and fuzzy creature. She had never heard him use any form of endearment before, but maybe Chrissy’s pathetic expression had swayed the stubborn man. A point for their team.

“And you’re sure you don’t know who he might have seen that night?”

“No.”

“Do you think his brother Arthur would have been there?”

“Well, maybe. Sometimes they’d go together, sometimes not. You know how brothers are. Sometimes Roy Dean’d get mad at him for some silly little thing and not talk to him for a day or two.”

Goat scribbled in his pad a little more. “How about since then? Any more fights? Did you overhear any arguments, maybe on the phone?”