Champagne for Buzzards (8 page)

“Maybe not.” He took a sip of his coffee and then said, “Clay already took Sweet Meadow, the orange grove on the other side of Riverwood, to court and stopped them from pumping the creek dry. Sweet Meadow Farm can only take so many gallons a day out of the creek, not nearly what they were taking before Clay arrived. Clay owns on both sides of the creeks up here near the road. Richard Arby, who owns Sweet Meadow, wanted the west side of the creek from Howie so he wouldn't have to pump Sweet Meadow's irrigating water so far. Offered him big money, but Howie wasn't going to let either of them in so when Clay came along, he was the reasonable solution. Clay paid top dollar and Howie and Pearl get to live out their lives on their land, plus Howie has a job. They couldn't have gone on living here if either of those other two neighbors had bought them out, would have had to leave the county. Dying where you were born is something good.”

“What do you think is behind Lucan's death?” Tully shrugged. “Why would you kill someone? Me, I've done a lot of crazy things, wonder I haven't killed someone before now, but never have except in 'Nam. More luck than anything else that one of my fights didn't end with someone dead. But that was always in the heat of the moment, and those days are well behind me.” He scratched along his whiskered jaw. “Guess I'd still kill to protect you.”

Before this could go to my head he added, “Or Marley, or Ziggy. Only natural to protect the people in your life but I don't get angry or crazy enough to kill for any other reason anymore. What was done to Lucan, well there was emotion behind it. Hate or even fear, there was a kind of madness. The guy that did it wasn't just coldly ending a life; he was smashing a life, different sort of thing.”

“Could a woman have done it?”

He thought about it. “If Lucan was already in the bed of the truck, say he was drunk and came out of the Gator Hole and climbed into the back of the truck for a little nap, sort of thing a man can do when he's heavy in the liquor, then a woman could have found him there and beat him to death. A man's skull ain't as strong as you might think. One time, I saw a fella trip and hit his head on an iron gate. This little knob,” he made a circle with his fingers, “put there to look pretty, went into his head like a lead ball into water, killed him dead right there and then before anyone could do a thing.”

“Maybe Lovey did it,” I suggested.

“Hope not. It will break old Zig's heart.”

“Why?”

“That's where Zig's been goin' every day; got it bad for Lovey Sweet. He's there every morning for breakfast and every day for lunch. Old Zig just sits there and drools and leaves enormous tips.” Tully threw back his head and laughed at this outrageous turn of events. “Myself, I don't go there much 'cause I don't want to step into Zig's territory, being as handsome as I am.”

“So where have you been going for some sweet talk, Daddy?”

He gave me an exaggerated wink.

I grinned at him and asked, “You think the sheriff is going to figure out what happened to Lucan?”

Tully shrugged. “He didn't impress me much, didn't seem all that interested in Lucan. Might just pin it on the first person who looks likely. He was asking about someone hanging about and now you meet the Breslau bunch out back. Seems strange to me.”

“Are you saying the Breslau clan had something to do with this?”

“Don't know. The sheriff is first cousin to Orlin Breslau. I'm just telling you to remember that blood runs thicker than water out here. Things aren't exactly going to come down here like they would back in Jac. Independence is a small town and there are no disinterested parties.”

I started to tell him about the man in the palmettos, but Marley came into the kitchen. She'd put a lime green baseball cap on, pulling her mass of hair up under it. The glasses were gone and she was actually wearing some lipstick and mascara, makeup being one of the many fun things she'd given up while dating David. The Baptist grip on her was starting to loosen.

“You look real pretty, honey,” Tully told her. He turned to me. “You better stick real close to this gal today or someone's gonna steal her away from us.”

Marley beamed, just lit up like a Christmas tree. Even a compliment from my old man pleased her. Even the fact she knew my old man was a really bad judge of woman didn't stop her delight. Her confidence must have been lower than I realized.

“Can I take your truck?” I asked Tully. “I want to swing by the restaurant and pick up the champagne the buzzards and dead body made me forget.”

“Well, sure you can, honey. It might teach you to be more generous with your own vehicle.”

“Oh, you can drive Big Red now,” I said. “There's something about having a dead body in the bed that has made me go right off it.”

“Bet it's only temporary,” Marley said and bounced down the hall and out the front door.

I raised a finger to Tully, telling him to wait, and went down the hall after Marley and watched her turn on the tap and start watering the flowers. I went back to Tully and closed the door to the front hall. “I got a little surprise out there in the woods — well, two actually.” I told him about the face hidden in the jungle.

“Shit,” Tully said. “Why didn't you call the sheriff as soon as you got back?” He thought for a minute and said, “Best you girls go back to town.”

“Nope, I'm planning a party, remember?”

“Tell people it's been put off 'cause there's been a tragic accident.”

I only had to think about it a second. “Not going to happen. I've asked all of Clay's friends. We're doing this.”

“Why didn't you just hold it at the Sunset?” I didn't want to tell him it was because I wanted Clay and me to look like a real couple, with a real life. “Don't try to get out of cooking at my pig roast.”

“Okay, if you won't go back to Jacaranda then Zig and I are moving into the house.”

“Thanks, that will make Marley feel much better.”

“Tough girl,” he laughed. “Nothin' scares you, does it?”

“Only the cost of feeding you two. What do you hunt from the back of an ATV?”

Tully's eyebrows went up. “Me? Nothing.”

“Would you hunt for a man on them?”

Tully straightened.

“I see what you mean. Both the sheriff and Boomer are looking for someone. I don't think Boomer wants to arrest him.”

From the back porch Marley hollered, “Come on,” through the screen door.

I leaned forward and kissed Tully's cheek. “You be careful,” I told him.

“Always am,” he answered.

I started to leave and then hesitated and turned back, suddenly afraid for him, a black premonition of danger filling me with panic and dread.

“Go on,” he said, waving an arm. “Get out of here.”

Marley was searching through the glove compartment when I climbed behind the wheel. Not finding what she was looking for she started on the junk on the seat and the garbage on the floor. Tully's truck could substitute for a landfill site and contained stuff from the decade before my birth. “Did you lose something besides your mind?” She was now checking down the back of the seats. “Looking for cigarettes.”

“Tully quit smoking.”

“Oh, really? Just because you've been nagging him?” She pulled down the visor. “These will do,” she said, picking up the package of cigarettes that slid onto my lap. She opened the pack and held them out, “Want one?”

“I promised Clay.”

“Suit yourself.” The smell of the cigarette filled the cab and chipped away at my willpower.

“I thought you quit,” I said, sounding as grumpy as I felt.

“Did, but one can't hurt.”

She propped her feet up on the dash and opened the envelope with the list of furniture as I backed the truck around and started out the lane. Being a neat, in control, sort of orderly person, Clay not only knew where the keys to the units were, he also knew what was in every container. Very impressive and unusual behavior in my world.

After a failed fishing trip, I once heard my father tell my Uncle Dallas that he couldn't organize an orgy in a whorehouse. That pretty much is a family truth. I come from a long line of people with my uncle's lack of talent in the management department. In my family, not only would the keys never be seen again, no one would have a clue what was in the units, and for sure they would never pay the bill for the storage. And then there would be one more story added to the family legends of how, through no fault of their own, mind you, the Jenkins family had lost out on a great fortune. This epic would probably have some tricky educated person, some person with authority, doing them wrong and making off with their extremely valuable treasures. These stories are a great comfort to people who are their own worst enemies. We polish and embellish them until not a hint of a loser remains, turning them into sagas of evil overcoming decent folk. This ability to rewrite the stories of our own failures is our one true skill.

Marley read the list of furniture to me as I wrestled with Tully's old pickup, which kept heading for the ditch, probably in memory of days past — vehicle repair and home repair being two more things we Jenkins didn't go in for.

“Says here there is a silver tea service in the first unit and, in case you were wondering, it comes complete with sugar bowl, tongs, milk jug and tray, and it is early Georgian. What do you think that means?”

“Money, honey, money…old money and lots of it but I didn't think Clay's folks were all that rich. Maybe it is something he bought later. Can you imagine him going around to auctions and secretly buying things like a Georgian tea service and stashing it away?”

“Not really, but I always figured he had hidden depths. After all, he chose you. It would take a strangely perverted man to pick you from the crop, so buying stuff on the sly is not all that weird.”

“A man that chose both me and Georgian silver has very good taste.”

“Or a strange sense of humor.” She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and mumbled something unintelligible around it. The wind from the open window blew the scarf around her neck into her face as she was taking a huge life-destroying gulp of smoke into her lungs. I waited for the material to go up in flames but she batted it away and squinted at the papers in her lap. She took the cigarette from her mouth and said, “Mahogany dining table, sex chairs, nope, must be six chairs.”

“You think?”

“Slide…no, sideboard. That sounds good. I'm getting excited here.”

“Lucky you. Must be the thought of sex chairs.”

“You have no soul or mahogany would do it for you.” She pulled the pages up close to her eyes.

“Hey,” I warned. “Be careful you don't set them on fire.” She pushed them away again. “Shit, this print is really small.”

“Put your glasses on.”

She stuck the cigarette in the corner of her mouth to keep the smoke out of her eyes. Puffing the whole time, she dug through her bag for the glasses. “Better,” she said, pushing them up her nose and holding the cigarette to the window for the wind to take the ash. “What do you suppose King Charles spaniels are?”

“My guess is dogs, so you stand in front of me when we open the doors.”

It took over an hour to get to Sarasota and the three storage units, but oh, the excitement when we opened them.

It was Christmas and birthdays and Easter and every High Holiday I didn't celebrate rolled into one. We opened the first compartment, pulled aside the blankets and wrappings, screamed and jumped up and down and ran to the next storage unit. We opened it, uncovered stuff and screamed, jumped up and down and clapped our hands, all the time saying, “Look at this, look at this,” not really seeing anything but yelling anyway and then we ran to the last container, repeating the action, going crazy with greed and excitement and the beauty of what we saw.

It wasn't just old stuff, but fine antiques packed to the roof. Surely very little of it had come from Clay's family. They'd only become moderately well-to-do when they sold out to developers and moved to a new ranch farther inland. And while Clay's family was Old Florida, they weren't the kind of people who ran things or came out from England with a boatload of furniture. They were just hard-working ranchers who lived at the mercy of nature. This assortment looked like someone had spent a lot of time and energy building a collection.

Marley, the shopping whiz, called out a description of each piece as she found it — an orgasmic adventure for the queen of the garage sales. I started to wonder if she realized she wasn't going to get to take any of it home. Best not to tell her when she was in this state or she could turn vicious.

“Hey,” said Marley. “I saw a telephone book in your dad's truck.” She looked up from her papers. “Why would anyone carry a telephone book around? Get on the cell and find a mover to take this stuff out to the ranch.” She was now in charge so I did as I was told.

“The best I could do is Monday afternoon,” I told Marley when I came back. “Hey, where are you?” “In here. I think I found an organ.”

“Must have something to do with sex chairs, don't touch it, you never know where it's been.”

Her head poked up beside a floor lamp with an alabaster shade. “You are a very crude person.”

“I know. It happens every time Clay goes away. What do you suppose causes it?”

“You have a mind like a septic tank.”

“That's a shitty thing to say.”

“Humpf,” she grunted and disappeared.

“Hey, come out of there. You're going to bring the whole thing down on your head.” There was no response. I didn't want to be there when the accident happened so I went back and checked out the other two storage spaces. Even in a sixteenroom house, this furniture was going to make a statement and impress the hell out of everyone.

“Wow,” I heard from deep in the pile when I returned.

“What did you find?” I asked, although to tell the truth I wasn't that interested. The joy of antiques was brief for me. I had something else on my mind and I wanted to get back out to Independence.

“I found a beautiful carved headboard. Must be nearly eight feet tall.”

“Gross, come on, let's go.” Her head appeared again. “What's the hurry?”

“I want to get the champagne and get back and make plans. You know, figure out where it's all going to go.”

“Oh, good idea.” She hurried out now. “Maybe I should take pictures before we go.”

“I'm sure Clay said there were some back at the house. Use those.” She was going to give me grief when she found out there was no such thing but by then I'd have thought of something else.

“Oh, great, I'm really excited.” And she was, at least excited enough to run to the pickup while I locked up.

“I'm planning on measuring the rooms and making floor plans just like they show you in the magazines,” she told me. “Aren't you thrilled?”

“Just so long as the guests don't have to sit on the floor, I'm cool.” This wasn't exactly the truth. I cared a whole lot more than that. I should have known better. I had never fit into the Travis world, no matter how hard I'd tried. Jimmy's father was a plastic surgeon and Jimmy'a mother was the social queen of Jacaranda. Their world was a million miles from the trailer park on the edge of a swamp where I grew up, even though it was only a twenty-minute drive apart. I should have known it wouldn't work any better trying to fit into Clay's. But I'm a girl who never learns from her mistakes. I tend to stick to the old tried and true errors and make the same screw up again and again. That way I can avoid learning new things.

So here I was, taking a week off, the first in two years, to make everything perfect. In my head I could see the idyllic evening, the soft glow of ferry lights in the oaks, the Japanese lanterns strung along the porch, the house glowing and alive with lights. Along the porch and under the trees would be bistro tables with long white tablecloths and candles. Elegant and refined. I'd daydreamed about this for months. I was trying desperately to keep from Marley how important this party was to me. If she knew, she'd laugh herself silly.

She put down the list she was reading for the tenth time and announced, “I'm calling Jane. She works part-time at the office. I'm going to get her to work for me this week and I'll just cancel the rest of the appointments she can't cover. I'm taking a holiday.”

I didn't try too hard to talk her out of it.

We swung by the Sunset to load up the champagne. Marley wasn't going any farther until she was fed a huge lunch on the house. Before the food arrived she started in to tell me that I shouldn't get involved with Lucan's murder. “After all,” she reasoned, “if someone killed him in the parking lot and wanted to hide him and your truck was there, if it was just a random thing that he was put in Big Red, it hasn't anything to do with you, has it?”

“You're right, it isn't my problem,” I agreed. “I'm not involved and I have no intention of ever getting mixed up in it. Besides I have a new philosophy of life.”

“I wasn't aware you had an old one.”

“Shut up and listen, this is how it is…I no longer feel responsible for anyone but myself. Whatever happens I just let it flow by.” My right hand described the undulation of a stream over rocks as I told her this profound truth. “I'm not in control of anything and I don't want to be in control anymore.”

“You never were in control,” Marley pointed out.

“Yes, but now I realize it, that's the difference. It's all kinda Zen, this letting the world drift by. My own twelve steps for going through life serenely.”

“Weird,” she said and helped herself to my chips as the waitress set the plate in front of me. “But not any weirder than some of the stuff I've heard come out of your mouth.”

“I'm glad you appreciate it. Now tell me what's happening. Have you heard from David?”

The sunshine went out of her face and she dropped the chips onto her plate. “No. It's over. He wants to work full-time with the homeless, which will just about make him homeless as well when he gives up his own church. He won't have his own ministry anymore, no permanent congregation and no income. He will be subsisting on donations, living the same life as those he serves. His sacrifice means he's also sacrificing his future family.” Her food was forgotten as she leaned forward on both elbows and said, “I want kids, want to send them to good schools, have holidays, healthcare, all those things. I don't want my children to grow up in a homeless shelter.”

“Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Surely David sees that and agrees?”

She shook her head. “All he can see is the people who need him. Maybe if I loved him more I'd have been willing to make sacrifices as well.”

“Or maybe he doesn't love you enough if he chooses strangers over you. Marley, if he had chosen you, you would have clung to him no matter what. He made this decision without thinking about you. He's asking way too much.”

She sighed and said, “He wants me to be a better person than I am; he thinks I can be like him.”

“Yeah, well I've promised myself that in my next life I'll be a better person too, no shooters, no nights I can't quite recall, fewer parties and a whole lot less fun. But right now I'm dealing with the here and now and I think you should too. Don't try to turn yourself into some kind of a saint for someone else. You'll end up resenting him.”

“And yet I love him. I want to be as giving as David but I still want a home.” She leaned forward in her intensity. “That's why I'm going to enjoy this week. It might be the only time I get to decorate a house. I may never have a house of my own.”

“Of course you will.”

“Not like this one and not if I marry David.” Again the big sigh. “I'm selfish.”