Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 06 (20 page)

The waitress banged down two beers and a glass of sherry, regarded us with a frown until I’d paid the tab, and returned to the stool at the end of the bar to resume her conversation with the bartender. I suppose she’d overheard worse.

“Why did you go to the kitchen?” I demanded.

She looked at Estelle, who took a sip of sherry and said, “I already told Arly that you might have been in the mood for a glass of warm milk.”

“And I already said I didn’t believe one word of it.” I realized I was strangling an innocent beer glass and forced myself to uncurl my fingers.

“I reckon you don’t have much choice,” Ruby Bee said with a mulish frown.

“May I point out that the police do have choices? The most obvious one is to drag you back to that cold, dirty cell and leave you to regale the rats with your silly lies. Then again, they might choose to interrogate you night and day until you come up with a better explanation.”

Her lower lip may have quivered just a tad, but she shook her head, finished her beer, and put down the glass. “I need to get back to the hotel and study my recipe. Come on, Estelle, you can coach me on the order of the ingredients.”

“There is no contest!” I said so loudly that the waitress and bartender stared. “There has been a murder, dammit! The police will be there to conduct an investigation, not to sample the entries and pick the winner! They may even want to ask you some questions—none of which will have anything to do with teaspoons and measuring cups and pinches of salt and Krazy KoKo-Nut!” I could hear myself getting more strident with each sentence, but I was unable to stop myself. “You found the goddamn body, Ruby Bee! Don’t you remember?”

“How could I forget a thing like that? Do you really think they’ll stop the contest? Jerome wasn’t a contestant, you know.” She shrank under my glare, then took a tissue from her handbag and dabbed at her nose. “Maybe you’re right about the contest being canceled. It’d be hard on Brenda to fix her entry not ten feet from where they found her husband’s body.”

“She’d be fumblin’ like a pup,” Estelle added. “Of course he was supposed to have left her for a younger woman, so it’s not like she planned on seeing him anytime soon.”

I gestured at the waitress for another round. “I can see you’re both too distressed by Jerome’s murder to discuss last night. Let’s talk about the night Durmond was mugged and tucked into bed in your room. Where were you before you came back to the room?”

“Shopping,” they said in unison, although not with the melodious effect of the Methodist choir.

“At nine o’clock?” I took my sweet time raising my eyebrows. “I would have thought you’d be worn out from the trip, if not a tiny bit intimidated about prowling after dark in a big, bad city. Where did you go?”

“Just here and there,” Ruby Bee mumbled. She stared at Estelle, who nodded nervously in agreement.

“What did you buy?” I persisted.

Estelle hesitated until the waitress had replaced our glasses with full ones, then cleared her throat and said, “I picked up some souvenirs at a shop at the end of the block. Nothing really interesting.”

“A shop at the end of the block?” I said. “Do you mean the porn shop at the end of the block? What exactly did you buy—a leather bikini? Handcuffs? Edible underwear?”

She turned bright pink. “It’s none of your business, missy. I just browsed for the most part.”

“You didn’t tell me it was that kind of place,” Ruby Bee said, then realized her error and got real busy with her beer.

“And where did you go?” I growled at her.

“I decided to visit a few grocery stores, just to compare what they carry with what’s at the SuperSaver back home. I went into one place that was run by these Asian people. You’d think one of them could speak American, but they were all gobbling in some language that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. They sounded like a flock of turkeys the way they were carrying on.”

She was turning pinker than Estelle, and her hand shook as she picked up her glass. Despite her years of intensive practice, she was not a particularly glib liar.

“I get it,” I said slowly. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you get a package of coconut so you could use it in your cake instead of the soybean flakes? You’ve done some lowdown things before, but I’m amazed that you would stoop to cheating in a cooking contest, Ruby Bee.” I tried not to grin, but I couldn’t help it. “I’m disappointed in you, to say the least. What would Lottie and Elsie think if they heard about this?”

Ruby Bee hung her head in a fine display of penitence. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s not my fault that Krazy KoKo-Nut tastes so dadburned awful that it’ll ruin the best recipes. I just couldn’t bring myself to make my chocolate chip bundt cake and use that stuff. I have my reputation to think of.” She gave me a look meant to be remorseful, but it reeked of slyness. “You won’t tell anybody, will you? I don’t know what Geri would do if she heard about it, but I’d as soon lick the sidewalk in front of the hotel as be thrown out of the contest and sent home in disgrace.”

“I may, or I may not,” I said archly. “Is that why you snuck down to the kitchen last night—to put the real coconut in your box?” She nodded warily. “Well, did you make the substitution or not?”

There was a pause that didn’t just reek of slyness; it literally stank of it. “No,” she said, “because of the shock of finding the body like I did. I was so discombobulated that it was all I could do to get myself out of there before I was murdered.”

“Speaking of which,” Estelle murmured, “maybe we ought to go back to the hotel? Geri’s likely to be in a real tizzy this time, what with the police and all. She’ll be sobbing louder than a passel of preachers outside the Pearly Gates.”

“Yeah?” Jim Bob said into the receiver, not sounding real friendly. He held a towel around his waist, but he could feel the water dribbling onto the floor, which meant he’d catch hell unless he mopped it up hisself and that was a goddamn pain in the ass. He was on the verge of saying as much when he realized who was calling. As he listened, his hand turned numb and the towel slid down his body to form a beige puddle around his feet.

Even though it was a nice, warm day, he started shivering worse than a wet hound, and it was all he could do to keep from howling like one, too.

“So I’ll just stick it in the mail,” the female voice concluded, wished him a nice day, and hung up.

Jim Bob was well past worrying about some water on the hallway floor, but he made a swipe at it with the towel before returning to the bathroom and sinking down on the seat of the commode. It seemed like an appropriate place to sit, considering the deep shit he was in.

According to the cute lil’ clerk, Mrs. Jim Bob had inadvertently left her credit card on the counter—when she’d decided to use the charge account. He’d gone to the trouble of drivin’ all the way to Fort Smith to do his shopping, and damned if she hadn’t waltzed into the exact same store. And learned all about the charge account.

She was a lot of things, but the one thing she wasn’t was stupid. Naughty Nights wasn’t easy to mistake for a bookstore or a drugstore (except, maybe, for the display of fruit-flavored condoms). To add to his bewilderment, the clerk had said Mrs. Jim Bob’d bought a damn armload of merchandise. Just what was she planning to do with a black peekaboo bra, fer chrissake? Wear it to Wednesday evening prayer meeting? Prance down the road to the SuperSaver and show it to the stock boys? Dance half-naked in the moonlight?

Something real peculiar must have come over her, he thought as he tossed the towel in the corner and walked to his bedroom, his pudgy white flesh glistening with a mixture of bath water and Sweat. It wasn’t like she would be caught dead in some sexy little nightie—not the saintly Barbara Anne Buchanon Buchanon. She was a sight too fond of reminding him of the sins of lust and fornication. She could reel off the thou-shalt-not’s with out pausing for breath, even though she’d added about a dozen more of her own making, most of them involving booze, muddy boots, and bodily functions.

He tried to picture his wife in almost anything from Naughty Nights, but it was harder than picturing her snugglin’ up with Raz or belching after a cold beer. Sweet Covita over in Emmet had looked right dandy in the little gift he’d given her the week before, and she’d expressed her gratitude with imagination and skill. Even Winona had been a knockout in her nightie, despite her buckteeth and fat ass and tendency to forget to shave under her arms, and she’d been generous to a fault. The padded dashboard had been the only thing saving ‘em from a concussion.

He realized he was letting his mind wander from what was likely to be a fuckin’ nightmare starting the minute Mrs. Jim Bob walked through the door. If he was there, that is. If he was long gone, she’d have some time to simmer down, and when he came back, she might not skin him alive.

It wasn’t like he was afraid of her, he told himself as he began to stuff shirts and jeans into a suitcase. Hell, he was three inches taller and outweighed her by a good fifty pounds. Socks and jockey shorts went into the suitcase. He was the man of the house, the breadwinner, the provider and protector. A magazine from under his mattress followed the underwear. He sure as hell wasn’t scared of any damn woman, and never would be. A handful of Tshirts and he was done.

He grabbed the suitcase and went out to the telephone in the hall. After a couple of fumbles that resulted in nasal admonishments that the call could not be placed, he managed to dial Larry Joe Lambertino’s number.

“Listen up,” he said, seeing no reason to waste time, we’re gonna spend a couple of days at that fishin’ camp on the county line just past Chowen. While you’re throwing your crap in a bag, I’ll call to get us a cabin and make sure we can use one of their boats if we’re a mind to.” He flinched as he heard a faint noise downstairs, then assured himself it was only the furnace kicking on. “And fer chrissake, don’t go blabbing all over town about it. I got some reasons why I don’t want one single person to know where we’ll be. Once we get there and get started on the bourbon, I’ll explain. Put your scrawny butt in gear, and be ready for me to pick you up in ten minutes.”

He hung up and called the assistant manager to tell him to run the store and just this once to keep his greedy fingers out of the cash register and out of Winona’s panties. The assistant manager choked out a promise (although he was lying through his teeth about one or both). The ol’ boy at the fishing camp said he’d reserve the best cabin.

Jim Bob picked up his suitcase and went downstairs to the kitchen. He loaded a grocery sack with cans and what he could find in the refrigerator, including a goodsized hunk of meatloaf and half a strawberry pie, and took all of it to his car. After he’d fetched his fishing gear from the garage and stowed it in the trunk, he was feeling a sight more cheerful.

Only one last chore remained. He went to the kitchen and hunted up a pad of paper and a stumpy pencil. He laboriously wrote a note telling her he’d gone away on business for a few days and would see her when he got back. He signed it with his initials and, whistling, went out the door.

All the way across town, which wasn’t even a fraction of the distance from the Bronx to the Battery, Joyce Lambertino was still frowning at the telephone. She didn’t so much as look up when something crashed in the kitchen and Saralee began to screech bloody murder.

There were no police cars in front of the Chadwick, nor was there a doorman. Just inside the door, however, was a uniformed cop with a grim look. “Who’re you?” he asked us.

I told him, and was told to go to the dining room and wait. Ruby Bee and Estelle were told to wait in their room, and they hurried toward the elevator without so much as a word of compassion for yours truly. I did as ordered and was sipping coffee as a middle-aged man in a brown suit came to the doorway. He had the jaw of a pitbull and the manners to match. “You Arly Hanks?” he demanded.

I wiggled my fingers and said, “I am.”

“Where the hell have you been for the last hour and a half? Sightseeing? Shopping? Did it occur to you that you might have stayed around the hotel until we arrived? You may be some toad-suckin’ hick from Arkansas, but surely you’ve seen enough cop shows on television to know you’re supposed to wait for the police?”

This was not a good beginning for a deep and abiding friendship. I looked at him for a minute, then took a breath and in my twangiest voice, said, “Shit, Mr. Policeman, I dun reckon I was out there, just agawking and a-gaping ‘cause I ain’t never seen buildings higher than three stories. My eyeballs dun near popped out like a bullfrog’s, and I was nigh onto swallowing my tongue, lemme tell you.”

He harrumphed as he turned around to converse with a younger man in an equally drab suit. After papers were exchanged, he turned back and said, “I’m Lieutenant Henbit of the homicide division. If we could cut the crap, I’d like to know what you heard last night when you were skulking in the hall upstairs.”

“Skulking, Lieutenant Henbit?”

“According to”—he consulted a paper—“Kyle Simmons, you told him that you overheard a conversation between the deceased and his wife, during which harsh words were exchanged.”

“I reckon I might have told him that,” I said, the hayseed still firmly between my teeth. “Course Bubba and Elmer are always saying I’m tetched in the head. Bubba’s my uncle, and my brother, too, on account of our family tree bein’ a mite short on branches. Elmer ain’t related to nobody what we can figure, but he lollygags out back a-tryin’ to court the prettier heifers.”

“I apologize, Ms. Hanks,” he said, his voice as strained as his smile. “I’m sure whatever errand you went on was justified, and I had no business making any wisecracks about your state. We are investigating a murder, and I would appreciate your full cooperation.”

I related what I’d heard through the Appletons’ door and described the scene earlier in the morning when Brenda had been bullied out of the bathroom. “She really did seem to think he was on his way to South America,” I concluded.

“He’s on his way to the morgue, ” Henbit said as he fixed himself coffee and sat down across from me. “She, on the other hand, seems to have disappeared.” He was trying to be affable, but his jaw trembled and his eyes were intent. “The doorman said she left before the body was discovered. Do you have any idea where she is?”