Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (6 page)

Tammy shook her head and jerked the box away.
 
“You didn’t share
none
of yours,” she said.
 
“So don’t you come
sniffin’ around
mine.
”
 
Tammy made quick work of the remaining beef then put the container on
the bedside table.
 
While Carl chewed up
the bits of pork and egg and green onion, Tammy shut her eyes and started
rubbing her temples.

“This is good stuff,” Carl said, finishing the mu shu.
 
He glanced at the clock on the dresser and
saw that they had about two hours before they had to be at work.
 
Carl drained the rest of his Bud and dropped
the can on the floor.
 
He reached over to
Tammy.
 
“Hey, you know what?
 
I’m thinking I might want me some seconds,
puddin’.
 
Whaddya say?”

“I got a damn headache,” Tammy said, pushing his hand away.

Carl gritted his teeth again.
 
If he wanted a woman with a damn headache he
could’ve stayed at home.
 
Tammy got up
and padded into the bathroom.
 
“I need an
aspirin,” she said.
 
Carl laid in bed
wondering if he ought to make a quick exit or if he should wait and see if
Tammy was willing to give it another go after she medicated herself.
 
After a moment he decided to get out of
there.
 
He was looking around for his
pants when he heard a crash in the bathroom.
 
It sounded like Tammy had just raked everything off the shelves in the
medicine cabinet.
 
“You okay?”
 
He waited a second but Tammy didn’t
answer.
 
Then he heard an odd gurgling
noise.
 
With one leg in his pants, he
hopped toward the bathroom to see what had happened.

Just as he reached the door Tammy staggered towards him, her
face frozen in horror.
 
She was spitting
pink mucus and she couldn’t breathe.
 
She
lurched forward, grabbing Carl, nearly pulling him to the floor.
 
“Holy shit!”
 
Carl had no idea what was happening, but he
knew it was bad.
 
He had never seen such
terror in anyone’s eyes.
 
“The hell’s
wrong?”

Tammy convulsed and managed to say, “Carl.”
 
Then she collapsed.
 
Carl was paralyzed as he watched Tammy’s face
lapse into a hideous twitching seizure.
 
He thought about giving her mouth-to-mouth, but quickly decided against
it.
 
He could tell this wasn’t about
needing air.
 
And the unsightly foam
gathering around her mouth was damn unappealing.
 
It seemed like he stood there for an hour
watching her die, but she actually stopped moving within a couple of
minutes.
 
Carl squatted down and felt for
a pulse, but there was nothing.
 
She had
died all at once.
 
Carl suddenly got a
terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach.
 
Fuck!
 
The Chinese food’s poisoned!
 
I’m going to die!
 
With my pants half on!
 
He raced into the bathroom and tried to make
himself throw up but he couldn’t do it.
 
After a minute he tried to get a grip on himself and assess his
health.
 
Other than being scared sick, he
felt fine.
 
Maybe it was just the orange beef.
 
He was suddenly glad Tammy had refused to share.

Carl’s mind raced as he considered his options.
 
What
the hell do I do now?
 
If I leave her here,
someone will eventually find her and God knows I left plenty of DNA
evidence.
 
I shoulda used a damn
rubber.
 
Plan B?
 
If I call the cops and tell ‘em what
happened, Eddie and my wife will find out we was screwing around but at least
I’ll be less of a suspect, since suspects don’t usually call the cops, do
they?
 
Hmmm, that’s a plan of last
resort.
 
Plan C?
 
What if I dump her body in one of the big
lakes?
 
Sardis
?
 
Arkabutla?
 
Enid
?
 
Hell, there’s no time for that, I’d be late getting to work, besides which
there’s bound to be a hundred people at every lake in the state this time of
year.
 
Plan D?
 
What if I make it look like somebody killed
her?
 
No, wait, somebody did kill her,
right?
 
Or did they?
 
Why the hell was she dead?
 
Wait a minute!
 
Plan E!
 
Best idea yet.
 
He thought it through the best he could and
decided it was the right thing to do, all things considered.

Carl knew he had to act
quick
.
 
He didn’t think the plan would work if Tammy
started to get cold on him from the feet up.
 
First thing he did was run into the kitchen and put on the pair of
bright yellow rubber Platex gloves.
 
They
were two sizes too small but they’d prevent the further spread of fingerprints.
 
Next he ran back into the bedroom and grabbed
the little .22 pistol Tammy kept in the dresser drawer.
 
He stopped for a second to think about
everything he’d ever learned from television cop shows, then he put the gun in
Tammy’s hand, put it to her head, and helped her squeeze the trigger.
 
He looked the other way and got as far as he
could so nothing would splatter on him.
 
Pop!
 
The .22 kicked a little when
it fired.
 
Carl looked and was relieved
to find it wasn’t too messy on his side of Tammy’s head.

He left the gun in her hand and watched her for a
minute.
 
Dammit!
 
He’d waited too
long.
 
There was hardly any blood coming
out of the wound.
 
Without more blood,
even the dumbest cop would know she was dead before she was shot.
 
Carl decided to give her some CPR to pump
some out.
 
Once he’d coaxed a little
blood onto the floor, he started to wipe his fingerprints off everything he’d
touched.
 
He went into the bathroom and
put everything back into the medicine cabinet, including the box of Dr.
Porter’s Headache Powder.
 
He looked at
the clock.
 
Thirty minutes before he and
Tammy were supposed to be at work.
 
Just
one thing left.

Carl took a piece of paper and a pen and wondered where to
begin.
 
He had never written a suicide
note.
 
What would she say?
 
Wait a
second, I can’t write the damn note.
 
Eddie’d know her writing.
 
Quick, Plan B?
 
Uh,
got it!
 
Carl rummaged though drawers
until he found some scissors, some glue, and a couple of People magazines.
 
Like a frantic kidnapper, he cut letters out
of big print ads and story headers.
 
After a few minutes he had what he needed.
 
He took the glue and pasted together the
shortest suicide note in Quitman County
history.
 
It said, simply, “
Depressed
.”
 
He put Tammy’s fingerprints all over it and
propped it up against the flower vase on the dresser.

Fifteen minutes till his shift started.
 
Carl made the bed,
then
ran back to the kitchen where he grabbed a plastic garbage bag.
 
He gathered the Chinese food to-go boxes and
the beer cans,
then
he stopped and looked around for
anything he might have forgotten.
 
It
looked good.
 
He put on one of Eddie’s
baseball caps and snuck out the back door.

7.

Henry Teasdale had political ambitions.
 
They weren’t big ones, but they were
ambitions nonetheless.
 
The Teasdales had
lived in Quitman County
for five generations and, over that period, had evolved from a clan of
clay-eating peckerwoods to a family of social standing.
 
Henry was well known throughout the county as
a successful businessman.
 
He had a
controlling interest in a large catfish farm, owned significant tracts of
arable land, had some oil and gas holdings, and he owned the county’s largest
retail business, The Dollar Store in Hinchcliff,
Mississippi.

Recently, after his district’s incumbent was convicted of
taking kickbacks from an FBI agent posing as a culvert contractor, Henry
decided the time was right for him to run for a seat on the County
Board of Supervisors.
 
With the election still five months away,
Henry still spent most of his time managing The Dollar Store.
 
It was the best way to keep his employees
from robbing him blind and it was also the easiest way to campaign.
 
He just roamed the store pressing the flesh
and handing out twenty-percent-off coupons to anyone who agreed to vote for him.

Carl had been at work for about an hour when his boss walked
into sporting goods.
 
Carl was nervous as
a frog on a busy road with a busted jumper but he tried to remain calm.
 
There was no way Mr. Teasdale could know
anything, right?
 
Still, Carl was afraid
there was something about the way he looked that might give away his terrible
secret.
 
He feared Mr. Teasdale could see
his heart pounding beneath his polyester shirt and vest.
 
Carl knew sleeping with the boss’s daughter
was against company policy, but, as Carl knew better than anyone alive, that
wasn’t the worst of it.
 
Just relax
, Carl told himself.
 
Take a
deep breath.
 
Speak.
 
“Hey Mr. Teasdale, how you
doin’?”

“I’ve felt better,” Mr. Teasdale said, “but it cost me
more.”

“Yes, sir.
 
Me too.”
 
Carl fiddled with a display of aluminum
baseball bats, trying to look busy and worth having as an employee.

“Carl, you got any idea where that useless daughter of
mine’s at?”

Carl swallowed hard and acted ignorant.
 
It was the easiest thing he’d done all
day.
 
“I thought she was working.”
 
He looked over in the direction of women’s
wear.

“No, she didn’t show up for her shift.
 
I called over to the house but got the damn
machine.”
 
Mr. Teasdale leaned an elbow
on the shelf with the catcher’s mitts and rubbed at his forehead.
 
“How the hell am I supposed to run a business
if my employees don’t show up, huh?
 
Tell
me that, Carl.”

Carl shook his head and shrugged, hoping his anxiety didn’t
show.
  
“I don’t know, Mr. Teasdale.
 
It’s not like her to miss a shift.”

Henry nodded.
 
“I
guess I’ll ride over to her place and see what’s going on.”

“Yes, sir.”
 
Carl almost broke down and told his boss he’d
been with Tammy just a few hours earlier and that she had died suddenly from a
bad serving of orange beef and that in his panic, he’d made the whole thing
look like a suicide and Lord knows he was sorry.
 
But somehow Carl managed to keep his big fat
mouth shut.
 
He knew if he let that cat
out of the bag, the rest of the litter would follow.
 
If it was known Carl was present at the time of
Tammy’s death, the coroner might go poking around in areas that would lead to
certain foreign bodily fluids and, what with Eddie being out of town and all,
Carl would be in the awkward position of having to give some blood.
 
And that would lead to Carl losing his wife,
his job and, depending on how jealous a husband Eddie was, possibly his life.

8.

Henry Teasdale didn’t want to believe his tormented eyes,
but there she was, lying on the floor, too dead to skin.
 
“Oh honey,” he whispered.
 
“Why’d you do it?”
 
It was a terrible sight, the sort of thing no
man should have to see, but Henry’d seen it and there was nothing he could
change.
 
Or
was there?

You ask anybody in Quitman
County and they’d tell you Henry
Teasdale
was
nothing if not practical.
 
Yes, he had emotions and feelings and such,
but he had become successful not because he was in touch with his inner child,
but because he was a pragmatist.
 
So
after the initial shock wore off, he got to thinking about things he could
fix.
 
He couldn’t fix the fact that Tammy
had killed herself and, in so doing, had committed a terrible sin, but he could
fix whether it looked that way.