Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (37 page)

IN THE EARLY
hours of Friday morning, the officers of the law descended upon the Cactus Arms Motel. Memphis had sufficiently recovered to lead the investigation.

There wasn’t much to see.

Memphis himself noticed something white trailing out from under the lid of the toilet tank. He took the top off to find a hanky that bore the embroidered initials “GR” in the corner. His nimble fiddler’s hands undid the knot, and out tumbled the Horseshoe, the Cross, the Shamrock. Four more rings were scattered in the bottom of the tank.

The three men were wedged into the dingy little bathroom. Memphis was uncomfortably aware of his fellow officers, their uniforms, their elbows, their inquisitive eyes. Their badges.

“It looks like we have everything we need right here.”

“The Reverend’s rings.” Hiram’s jaw hung lower than a fat man’s bottom in a hammock. “If Gator Rollins wanted those rings enough to kill for’em, wouldn’t he have tooken’em with him?”

Deputy Garth had pasted the largest, whitest smile Memphis had ever seen across his face. Like a toothpaste ad. “Maybe he was in such a hurry he forgot. Don’t you ever forget things, Hiram?” He gave Hiram a hearty clap on the back that echoed off the shower enclosure. “Let’s go look for anything else he forgot, okay? Let’s go look in the main room.”

Garth urged Hiram out of the bathroom like a big dog.

Memphis leaned hard against the wall, his face as white as the tile. He picked up a towel and got to work.

He stepped out after a few minutes, the towel slung over his shoulders. Hiram was busy eating through the contents of the room’s mini-fridge and watching TV. Garth quietly passed his superior officer a pair of down-at-the-heel pink moccasins. Then he studied a paint-by-numbers desertscape hanging on the motel room wall while Memphis slid the shoes into his pocket.

“We’d better call County and have this place dusted.” Memphis pressed his hand to his forehead, felt the tectonic shift of the world below him. He held out the baggie full of rings. “I’m going to leave you and Hiram in charge here. I need to get over to the hospital.”

Hiram stood up, shedding a lap full of crumbs on the rug. “Can I radio County?”

Garth shook his head, all smiles. “Gosh, Hiram, that seems like a waste of county money. You know they don’t have a very good cleaning crew here, and just think of all the prints that might be hanging around a place like this. Hundreds and hundreds. Don’t we have all the evidence we have right here?” He shook the Baggie, and the bright and sparkling items inside threw Hiram into a spin of admiration. Garth gave another of those toothpaste ad smiles. “Come on, Hiram. Let’s tape it off and go deliver these to the office. I’ll tell you what, you can carry them.”

MEMPHIS PARKED ON
Sweetly Dreaming Lane in front of his brother’s home. Melveena’s Caddy was parked behind him. His eyes burned from tears and smoking wreckage, his stomach rolled at the thought of human incineration, and his shoulder hurt from the exertion. He kept hearing the words of Melveena that day in his kitchen.

Wrath is the work of women and gods.

Which gods, he wondered. The pretty Jesus on his prayer card? The sly tricksters that figured in the stories his mother had told him in the cradle? The only God that was real to him anymore was the uncaring force that had driven him to his knees at the site of the accident. The God who only existed to be implored at life’s worst moments. Did that God have a stake in men having the deaths they deserved?

He stood beside his cruiser in the still of morning, watching as filmy curtains ruffled in and out of Fossetta’s back bedroom window. He took the small pair of pink moccasins out of his pocket and tucked them inside the rusty mailbox, because he knew this much. Whoever had killed the Reverend, it wasn’t sweet and silent Fossetta.

He shook his leonine head, smoothed his impressive mustache. Squared his broad shoulders. And knocked very lightly.

Rhondalee answered in her leopard-spotted robe and slippers. Her face was naked, her hair caught up under a scarf surprisingly close in the color of her hair when he met her.

Why, Memphis thought, she almost looks like herself.

“Rhondalee, it’s about Annie Leigh. Now, she’s all right, but she’s in the hospital with her mother.” He held out his arms to catch her when she fell down in her fit, then guided her to a seat at the kitchen table. He sat beside her, watching carefully for signs of shock while he told her of the night’s happenings, how Gator Rollins had kidnapped her granddaughter, how she threw herself out to escape. “I don’t know how that guitar case was made, but it was apparently of miraculous workmanship. It broke her fall. She said it was like riding something, the way it carried her to the ditch. The case is nothing but splinters.” The fit acted up a bit, then, there was some casting about of thin limbs, a shake of the head on the skinny neck. But she settled. “Rhondalee? I also want you to know that we found some fairly conclusive evidence that Gator killed the Right Reverend Henry Heaven. The Reverend’s rings. Gator Rollins must have killed the Reverend to get those.”

Rhondalee LaCour was on her feet in moments. “I need to get to work on a special edition of the newsletter!”

His voice was deep, gently encouraging, and filled with disbelief. “Well, don’t you think you’d better go see your daughter and Annie Leigh at the hospital? I was headed there myself, I can give you a ride.”

“It figures she’d get into some nasty business like this, wandering around in the night like she does as if the world was a safe place. Raven is with her. I have other things to attend to!” She rushed out the door in her robe, headed for her office at the Clubhouse.

Memphis sat a moment at the table, trying to find the energy to stand. He knew he had enough evidence to pin the murder of the Right Reverend Henry Heaven on the pile of ashes that was the late Gator Rollins. Rhondalee would handle the matter of public opinion. It would be sewn up and forgotten.

Still, it didn’t add up.

Memphis knew what Gator had done to deserve a death by fire. Gator Rollins was a monster. But Gator Rollins would never have taken a handful of junk from a man, let alone kill to do it. That left the Reverend. What had he done to call down divine wrath?

Wrath is the work of women and gods.

Memphis shook his head. He would never solve the murder by considering the vast and unknowable face of God.

He put his head in his arms on the table, and allowed himself to sleep.

MELVEENA HAD KEPT
a full night’s vigil beside Fossetta, who lay still and pale as a figure on a sarcophagus. But morning was underway, and there were matters important to which she must attend. Melveena touched that beautiful nimbus of hair. “I’ll be by later,” she whispered. “I’ll bring you something sweet.” She stood and stretched, feeling something pop in her lower back, but in a good way.

She stepped outside to the morning sky, so fresh, so much cleaner than anything it lit. She looked up and down the street at all the decorative yard displays. There was the little wooden cow with the hose in its tail, so that it would swish back and forth while watering. There were the geese, a pair, dressed for the season in colorful clothing. There was every kind of garden gnome, far more than seven, and two donkeys with carts. She looked at the Clubhouse yard. Gravel and cactus. She thought, that’s what grows in a place like this.

She heard a sound, then. A howl similar to the one that had blown around the Park all week, but this one had an earthly source. A mundane and mechanical sound.

The sound of several tortured trannies.

Yes, this was the sound of a caravan of Caravans, the pre-1989 models, all with defective transmissions that stopped shifting into “High” once the car warmed up. And these transmissions had driven a long, long time, West and South, from Utah to California, in second gear.

These mini-vans groaned in automotive complaint through the Park until they reached the ten spots marked “Visitor” in front of the clubhouse. There were only four vans, but the drivers parked so badly that they managed to fill eight of the spaces. The doors opened.

First came boys, boys with flat mouths and thick glasses, boys with hulking shoulders and pudgy chests, boys with worn out workpants and dusty boots. They immediately formed a ring around the sundial in the center of the courtyard of the clubhouse. They opened their flies and pissed like dogs. Tender is going to have a fit, thought Melveena. He’s going to have to take up the Astroturf.

Next, unfolding their legs from the mini-vans in a tired manner, came seven drab women. They peered around nervously. They saw Melveena. They looked at one another and began to nod. It was odd, that nodding, like the bobbing heads of the little dogs Melveena remembered seeing in the back windows of cars, back in the days before hatchbacks. Nod, nod, nod.

A young one left the group. She walked with a sideways angle to her gait, as if she might shy off. She wore her hair piled on top of her head. A wispy lock had worked its way free, and was stuck in the corner of her mouth.

“Hello.” Melveena spoke as sweetly as she could. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so. We need some help.” The girl’s voice registered as a whisper. She pulled that mouse-brown lock clear of her chapped lips. Melveena fought an urge to offer her a nice moisturizing swipe of Chanel lipstick, but look what had happened last time she made free with lipstick.

The other women slowly came to stand in a group around her, similarly skittish. Most of the dresses were pastel colors, but one had on a dark blue dress as wrinkled as her face. She peered at Melveena with fascination and horror, her thin lips working with distaste. Melveena found herself looking down to see what she wore to inspire such a disdainful reaction. It was a little on the matchy-matchy side, but it was certainly not out of line for daytime attire. She held out her hand to the woman in dark blue and smiled. “My name is Melveena Strange.” Her manicure simply hung there, untouched, until she withdrew it.

The older woman finally gathered her courage enough to speak. “Good morning to you.” She swallowed, swallowed again. “We’re looking for Mr. Gator Rollins.”

Another woman stood forward, dressed in pale turquoise. She looked to be in her thirties, but she might have been an exhausted twenty-something. “Yes. We’re looking for Mr. Gator Rollins.”

“I believe he’s left town.” Melveena watched the boys, who shambled up the street, spitting and shoving and swarming the Tyson satellite dish. Two were tormenting the penned Rottweilers. “You’re his… family?”

The seven women nodded and nodded, searching each other’s eyes for agreement and affirmation and courage. Apparently, they found it.

“Yes,” said another. “He’s our husband.”

And so, while Melveena spoke ever-so-gently to the seven wives of Gator Rollins, the residents of the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park woke to the hard yellow light of another morning.

MEMPHIS ENTERED AN
office full of mayhem.

There were a bunch of Bone Pile men in there speaking calmly, punctuating their words with pleasing rises and dips in volume. “Yup, I said that he left for a time, but I ain’t all that sure how long a time it were.” “I don’t know how long it were, and I don’t think you asking me fifty time is gonna change that.” “I don’t know how long. Maybe five minutes. Maybe five hours. But he left for a time. For a time, he left.” While the Bone Pilers obfuscated, boys with blank eyes climbed around the desks like recently released zoo animals. Seven washed-out women milled around the office repeating certain phrases like mantras that would deliver them from the reality of their loss. “I can’t believe it.” “He would never do this to us.” “I can’t believe it.” “This isn’t like him.” “He couldn’t have.” “We don’t believe it.” “We were blessed to have a man like Gator in our lives.” The boys kicked over trashcans and whooped. And when someone finally made it clear to Memphis that these women were none other than the seven wives of Gator Rollins, he got busy with explaining. Garth had done a fine job of breaking the news, but the women couldn’t take it in. They didn’t believe that he had been implicated in the murder of a man of God.