Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (20 page)

Mrs. Jim Bob was steaming, but she got herself under control and said, “There is nothing wrong with the mannequin. You may take the photograph with it at no charge, as long as you take your child out of my store once and for all. I’ll pay you a dollar if you’ll take this heathen along with you.”

I may not have been at my height of perspicacity, but I sensed there was something fishy going on. I released Hammet and approached the mannequin in the front window. The face was obscured by a cowboy hat and polyester wig, but even from a distance I could tell the hands were not plastic. They were tied to the guitar with transparent string, most likely fishing line, and dotted with freckles, dark hairs on the upper fingers, and on the left thumb, the residual whiteness of an old scar.

And it did smell bad. I ordered everyone back, then knelt down and looked up at the shadowy face. I was prepared for Dahlia’s missing victim, so I was startled when I saw features that brought to mind Ripley Keswick. The nose was as thin and sharp, the blank, open eyes the same faded blue. Ripley’s complexion was rosier, however, and I’d left him in good health less than half an hour earlier. “What’s … wrong?” gurgled Mrs. Jim Bob.

I stood up and tried to ignore the sour redolence. “Unless you got a hot deal at the morgue, this is not your mannequin. I don’t know who it is. Do you?”

“It’s a dead man,” the brat squealed, still holding his nose and prancing around the back of the room. “Mama, why doncha take my picture with a dead man? The kids at school will have a cow when I show ‘em!”

The woman took out her camera. “Well, go up there and stand next to him, Bernie Allen. Hurry up, now; we’re supposed to meet your pa for lunch in ten minutes.”

The other customers were crowding in, and the smell was threatening to dislodge the contents of my stomach. If Estelle had walked in with a box of snow, I would have buried my head in it. As it was, I ordered everybody out to the parking lot in front and went to the telephone to call Harve to report that I’d lost one body—but not to worry, I’d found another.

Hey, all in a morning’s work in the Garden of Earthly Delights.

Harve caught a whiff of the corpse and halted in the doorway, his thumb hooked in a belt loop and his lips pulled back to expose tobacco-flecked teeth. “A real ripe one, huh?”

Behind him in the parking lot, the customers had recovered nicely from their eviction and were photographing each other in front of the store. Mrs. Jim Bob paced in a tight circle, snapping at anyone who dared stray into her path. I was responsible for this noticeably un-Christian behavior; she’d wanted to rope off the area around the body and keep selling ashtrays and Tshirts, but I had not been amenable. Darla Jean sat on the top step of the porch and prevented the more adventuresome fans from peering through the window. Hammet was charging two dollars to pose and his pockets were bulging.

“I took a quick look at the body,” I said. “There’s blood in the left ear and a dark smear visible under the back of the wig, probably from a fractured skull. It looks as if the face was wiped, but there’s coagulated blood in the nostrils and a small amount of blood froth around mouth. Lungs punctured by a broken rib, maybe.”

“But no blood on the clothes?”

Harve seemed content to conduct his investigation from the doorway, but I was keenly aware of our audience. I curled my finger until he came inside and I could lock the door behind him. I pulled down the shade, but there was no way to block the view through the window. We might as well have been investigating the death of a guppy in the bottom of a well-lit fishbowl.

I moved away from the window. “Not on what he’s wearing now and none that I could find on the floor. Even if the injuries are the result of an accident, someone brought him here, dressed him up, and propped him in the window. Someone with a real macabre sense of humor, that is. We know the body’s been here since Mrs. Jim Bob arrived shortly after nine and discovered evidence of the break-in. Neither she nor Darla Jean paid any attention to the mannequin, but once the room warmed up, a kid noticed the smell.”

“It’s getting harder and harder to miss. Any idea of the time of death?”

“The local forensic pathologist eloped with the local forensic psychiatrist, Harve. All I could do was confirm the guy’s dead, secure the scene, and call you. I’ve got my hands full with the Nashville folks and a town overflowing with tourists, and I don’t have time to take on a homicide investigation, even with a body.”

“You in the middle of one without a body?” Despite strict procedural guidelines to the contrary, he lit a stubby cigar. I didn’t protest, because its stench was preferable to the one emanating from the body hunched over the guitar. At the moment of death, the body relinquishes any pretense of dignity. Now I could only hope neither of us followed suit.

I related Dahlia’s ludicrous story, then pointed out that Dentha had called his office from Little Rock a couple of hours ago. “Also,” I added, “she claimed her victim was sixty-ish with brown eyes and silver hair. Our friend up front has blue eyes, dark hair, and he’s closer to forty.”

“You check for a wallet?”

“No, Harve, I didn’t check for a wallet. I just explained that this is your baby. I am a one-person department, and I’m ass-deep in tourists, celebrities, reporters, traffic jams—”

“Keep your tail in the water. Today’s the final day of deer season, so my absentee rate’s sky-high, but the team’s already on the way and the coroner will be here as soon as he gets the message at his cabin over in Comfrey County. I don’t see any reason why you can’t slip that fellow’s wallet out of his pocket so we can have a look through it.”

“This is not my case. Your department has jurisdiction over felonies in towns where the police department lacks resources to handle the investigation. I’ve already told you—”

“I heard you the first time.” Harve ground out his cigar in one of the souvenir ashtrays and brushed ashes off his belly, watching me out of the comer of his eye like a wolf nonchalantly strolling through a flock of sheep.

“I can call in the state police,” I bleated.

“They’re as shorthanded as I am. Tell ya what let’s do, Arly—we’ll see if this victim has any identification on him. He may be nothing more exciting than a tourist or a vagrant who had a heart attack, fell over backward, and cracked his head. Some drunken crony decided to have a little fun. If that’s the case, I’ll take full charge of the investigation.”

“And if he doesn’t fit either of those categories?”

Harve picked up a Matt Map and studied it. “I didn’t know Matt attended that old schoolhouse over near Emmet. Wasn’t it shut down back in the late sixties? Last I heard, the Klan bought it for their monthly potluck suppers and cross burnings. You ever wonder if they wear pointy caps on account of their pointy heads?”

There were times when I suspected Harve and Ruby Bee shared a common ancestor. “Would you stop worrying about Matt Montana’s school days and the county coneheads and worry a little more about that dead man in the window? What if he’s not a tourist or a vagrant?”

Harve put down the map, but he kept on browsing so he wouldn’t have to look at me. “Well, if it turns out he had some connection with the group from Nashville, it makes a helluva lot more sense for you to take the case. You already know ‘em, and they’re more likely to confide in you than in a stranger.”

“That is a detour on the highway to the garbage dump! I’ve had a couple of short conversations with the advance man, and Matt came by the PD last night for a few minutes. As for the others, we’ve exchanged nods and that’s it. We are not bosom buddies, Harve.”

“But your own mother is one of the organizers, so she’ll know all kinds of things about them. Mrs. Jim Bob out there owns the store. Brother Verber has three racks of postcards in his vestibule. Don’t forget about Elsie McMay and Eula Lemoy and Jimson Pickerell. All of ‘em will do everything they can to help you.”

I was too pissed off to point out the holes in his glib reasoning, which was probably the response he’d hoped for. “All right,” I said as I went stomping toward the window, “we’ll just play your little game of Russian roulette. You’re gonna be goddamn sorry when it turns out he’s a salesman from Kalamazoo and you spend the next three days trying to explain this long-distance to his grieving widow. I hate to think about all the paperwork involved in transporting the body across state lines. He’s wearing white just like the Klan, Harve. Hope you don’t have to deal with the FBI, too.”

I ignored the flutter of excitement from the crowd, felt the corpse’s rump, and realized someone had put the white cowboy suit over a more mundane outfit. There was a bulge, however, of the right size and shape. “I’m going to have to disturb the body to get to the wallet,” I yelled at the manipulative cigar-smoking son of a bitch in the back of the room. “You going to make the apologies to the coroner?”

“McBeen won’t even notice, ‘specially if he got a big buck.”

I noticed all sorts of unpleasant things, but eventually I wiggled my hand under the belt, got my fingernails on the comer of the wallet, and eased it out. My audience applauded, but I failed to curtsy and went stomping back to join Harve next to the cash register.

“You want to open it?” I growled, then slammed it down on the counter and flipped it open. The driver’s license, the dozen credit cards, the Social Security and group insurance cards, the business cards, and the wrinkled receipt from a dry cleaner all bore the same name: Pierce G. Keswick. Unlike Adele Wockermann, he had so many cards that we had enough identification for two or three corpses. We could have picked up his laundry, made reservations for a racquetball court, written or called him at his office, or even faxed him a message—if he weren’t tied to a chair in the window of Matt Montana’s Official Souvenir Shoppe.

“Shit,” I said as I stared at the photograph on the driver’s license. “Put a pinch of thyme in the lamb stew, Harve.”

Miss Vetchling sat alone in the Vacu-Pro office. The day’s mail had been readied for attention on Monday morning. The plants were watered. The upturned coffee pot was drying on the counter, as was her mug. Her keychain lay on the desk, but Miss Vetchling continued to sit long past her designated hour to lock the office and depart for the remainder of the weekend.

She had always prided herself on the orderliness of her personal life. She had her cat, Pussy Toes, her apartment in a quiet neighborhood, her meetings of the genealogical society, her knitting projects for nieces and nephews, and her annual vacation to a family-run hotel in Mexico where she remained drunk out of her mind for ten days straight (and was affectionately known throughout the village as Nuestra Seńorita de las Margaritas).

Rather than shopping at the grocery store or visiting the public library, Miss Vetchling was contemplating the telephone call. She had studied art history at college and doubted the call had originated originated from the curator’s office at the Prado in Madrid. What maleficence was Mr. Dentha in the midst of? What cryptic chain of events had sent him off on a mission fraught with pseudonymous callers and the need for mendacity?

Miss Vetchling did not regard the world through rosetinted bifocals. She eavesdropped on her boss’s calls as a matter of course, steamed open his mail when the opportunity arose, corresponded with lonely gentlemen via personal ads, and read true crime articles as if they were recipes (“remove the eyeballs and set aside, then simmer the tongue …”).

Something was afoot. Miss Vetchling had looked through Kevin Buchanon’s folder long before Mr. Dentha had asked for it, but she’d found nothing to set her nose atwitch with the scent of intrigue. But he had, and that irritated her.

She went into his private office, sat down behind his desk and searched through the drawers, but his appointment book revealed nothing she hadn’t known from the previous Saturday’s ritualistic perusal. She used a hairpin to open the metal box where he kept papers, but again, nothing had been added to explain his mysterious trip. Once she’d extricated twenty dollars from his emergency fund, she conscientiously locked the box and replaced it.

She halted her investigation long enough to fetch her mug from the bathroom and pour herself an inch of scotch, then sat back in the leather chair, lit a menthol cigarette from the crumpled pack she’d found in the middle drawer, and considered Kevin’s brief tenure as a Vacu-Pro salesman. A polite young man, cursed with pustules pustules and more enthusiasm than intelligence, blindly believing in the integrity of the product and in Mr. Dentha’s impassioned pep talks, eager to display wedding photographs that Miss Vetchling felt might bring a tidy sum from the tabloids.

Unlike many of the disillusioned salesmen, Kevin had come to the office to return his demonstrator kit. He’d been a good deal more emotional than she or Mr. Dentha, both of whom were accustomed to such resignations. What precisely had Kevin said? Miss Vetchling sent a stream of smoke into the air and watched the motes roil in the light from the desk lamp. Another job, he’d said, with a chance to make more money. That ruled out very little; Vacu-Pro salesmen usually qualified for food stamps.

She replenished the scotch in her mug, lit another cigarette, and foraged further into her memory. On the eve of his resignation, Kevin had come by the office late in the afternoon, joking half-wittedly about a disastrous demonstration, and she’d given him one … no, two appointment slips for the evening. The next morning, before the other salesmen dragged in for the meeting, he tearfully tendered his resignation.

She returned to her desk and thumbed through the log until she found the last page that included Kevin’s name. Two appointments during the day, neither resulting in a sale. Then one at six o’clock and one at nine. It was impossible to determine if he’d shown up at any of them; salesmen were known to seek solace at a bar after a particularly brutal reception. However, she had something to go on that Mr. Dentha did not. Once she’d copied the four names and addresses and placed the slip of paper in her purse, Miss Vetchling restored the log to the bottom drawer, turned off the lamp, put on her coat, and left the office. As she started down the sidewalk, she wrapped her coat more tightly around herself, wondering if she might need an umbrella before the afternoon was over. Not an umbrella, she corrected herself with a toss of her chin. Brolly was the term used by proper spinster sleuths.