Rubbed Out (A Memphis BBQ Mystery) (12 page)

“Oh good. What do you think about Tim?” asked Lulu.

“He’s been a real good waiter. That’s my opinion anyway. We can depend on him to be here and he works hard while he’s here. He even plays cards with the girls sometimes,” said Sara.

“So Ella Beth told me,” said Lulu with a smile.

Sara stared thoughtfully into space for a moment. “Lately, though, he’s been kind of stressed.”

“I thought he always seemed stressed,” said Lulu.

“He does tend to sport that I’ve-been-run-over-by-a-bus look,” agreed Sara. “Still, it’s been more obvious lately.”

Lulu said, “No idea what’s bothering him? Does he ever talk about his personal life?”

“Never. One thing that was odd yesterday, though, come to think of it. He was in the office…which isn’t a big deal, of course, since it’s like an employee break room, too. But the strange part was that he was on the computer.”

Lulu frowned. “Hmm. That is sort of unusual, isn’t it? Maybe he was checking his e-mail or something.”

“Maybe. But when he spotted me, he jumped a mile and his face turned bright red. It struck me as a guilty reaction. I think he’s probably hiding something, Lulu.”

*   *   *

Cherry hooted on her end of the phone, making Lulu wince on hers. “Woo-hoo! A stakeout! Lulu, this is what I’ve always dreamed of.”

“Well, I guess it’s not
really
a stakeout. For a real stakeout, you want to be hidden the whole time,” said Lulu.

“We don’t want to be seen, do we? That’s why you’re
saying we’re going to park down the road from John’s house and lay low,” said Cherry.

“Right. But all we’re doing is waiting for John to come out of his house and into his driveway so we can talk to him alone,” said Lulu.

“Remind me again why we’re not knocking on his door and going in to talk to him?” asked Cherry.

“Safety first,” said Lulu. “We don’t want John to kill us in his foyer, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right. Although I guess we could pack heat and go over there. Or take Pink with us,” said Cherry.

“This way will probably work better—I hope anyway. If it doesn’t, we can always go to plan B. Bring something to do while we wait. It might be boring,” said Lulu.

This was how they ended up down the street from John’s house with Cherry wearing huge sunglasses that took up her entire face and a fuchsia scarf covering her hair. “Is that scarf less noticeable than your hair would be?” asked Lulu doubtfully.

“Sure it is! Besides, I couldn’t pass up the chance to wear a disguise during our stakeout.”

Cherry had been pretty keyed up at first, despite the fact that it was very early in the morning. Mighty early. They’d decided that they knew that John would be heading out to work in the morning and it would take less time to wait for him on his way out the door to work than to wait for him to come home from there.

Still, though, it did take a while. Cherry’s
stomach growled and she said, “I guess you don’t have breakfast for us in that huge pocketbook of yours?”

Lulu rummaged through it. “Not breakfast, but I have a few granola bars. And bottled waters. And I always keep treats for the Labs in here. B. B. and Elvis love to see me coming because they know they’ll get a tasty treat.”

Cherry chuckled as she took them from her, “You must have been a Girl Scout, Lulu, because you surely are prepared.”

Lulu was deep into her sudoku and Cherry was falling asleep and jerking back awake repeatedly when she suddenly sat up straight and put her face against the car window. “There he is! There’s John.”

And it was. He was very mild-mannered and nonthreatening in khaki pants and a striped golf shirt with a still-sleepy expression on his face.

“Let’s go!” said Cherry, reaching for the car door and struggling unsuccessfully with it. “Oy! Lulu, you’ve got the locks on.”

“Well, safety first,” said Lulu again, unlocking the car doors and hurrying to keep up with Cherry, who’d already sprung out of the car and was fairly sprinting up to a startled John in his driveway.

“Hi there, ladies,” said John, smiling, but with wary eyes. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.” He raised his eyebrows at Cherry’s scarf and sunglasses.

Lulu said, “Actually, we tried to find you at the festival, John. But your teammates said that you weren’t
there anymore. They gave us your address when they realized we wanted to talk to you.”

“What’s this all about?” His tone was still pleasant, but now the wariness was trickling through into his voice.

Cherry said, gazing at John through narrowed eyes, “That’s what we’d like to hear, too. We thought that you didn’t know Reuben.”

“I didn’t
know
him,” said John stiffly. “He’s not the kind of person that I’d know.”

“All right then,” said Cherry, reflecting John’s snippy tone back at him, “
acquainted
with him. You let us think that you didn’t know who Reuben Shaw was.”

“And, in fact,” said Lulu gently, feeling like she and Cherry were playing good cop/bad cop, “You did know who he was. And I believe you were at the Graces’ booth because you were wanting to confront Reuben.”

John’s hands shook with some kind of strong emotion. He shoved them into his pockets, his keys rattling as he did. He turned slightly and gazed broodingly at his house, a suburban two-story brick. “Seeing my house from the outside,” he said, “you’d never guess how totally devastated it is on the inside. How the kitchen is barely functional. How the master bathroom is gutted and cave-like. Looking at me, you’d never know how much money I’ve sunk into this totally unfinished project. Money that I didn’t even have to sink.”

John’s voice, although quiet, was chock-full of rage. Lulu and Cherry glanced at each other. Was John going
to flip out here in his driveway? Lulu said, “That must have been incredibly frustrating for you…”

He gave a short laugh. “Frustrating? Infuriating. And you’re talking like it’s in the past tense. It’s not. I’ve been living practically like an animal in there for months and months. At one point, I didn’t even have any working plumbing. The kitchen had no electricity. And this guy, this Reuben, wouldn’t even return my calls.”

Cherry’s eyes were wide. “I’d want to string him up. I really would.”

John didn’t even seem to register that she’d spoken. “I’d be expecting for him and his crew to show up and get me out of this mess. To make some kind of progress. Sometimes, on those rare occasions when I did manage to get him on the phone, he’d be so incredibly slick. He’d promise to be there. Oh, we were waiting on materials to come in, he’d say. They’re being delivered to your house today, he’d claim. But they wouldn’t.”

Lulu said, “So he’d string you along, promising that construction materials would come in and the crew would be there…and nothing?”

“Nothing. I wasn’t the only person he was doing this to, either. And I’m a total victim…helpless. I don’t have the money to even hire someone else to step in and do the job right, let alone to finish it. Reuben wouldn’t even answer his phone after a while.” John spread out his hands in a hopeless gesture. “What was I supposed to do?”

Lulu said, “So you showed up at the festival. You were already on a team. Maybe with your office, right?”

“Not exactly. More like the brother and friends of someone at my office. I was keen to have a real spot to hang out there. Reuben was such a blabbermouth. No wonder the work that he actually did was so shoddy—he was running his mouth the whole time that he should have been paying attention to what he was doing. Anyway, he was always bragging about how he made the best barbeque and sauce and how he was going to win the barbeque fest with his buddies.”

“I’m surprised y’all were even talking to each other,” Cherry said. “Sounded like you were ready to kill each other most days.”

“Most days we were. But this was before everything started going sour,” said John. He was getting worked up again. “Okay, now tell me why I’m getting all these questions. What are you, private investigators?”

Cherry glanced over at Lulu and snickered. Probably trying to picture Lulu in her peach-colored floral print dress as Sam Spade. Then Cherry cleared her throat and said coolly, “In a manner of speaking.”

Lulu said, “We’re trying to get to the bottom of things. One way we want to do that is to figure out what you were doing at the festival. We didn’t realize that you even knew Reuben. And we sure didn’t get that impression when you scooted out of there as soon as we heard that fight in Reuben’s booth. Why were you were keeping
such a close eye on Reuben? What were you trying to accomplish?”

John glanced around him to see if any of his neighbors were paying attention to what they were doing. “What was I trying to accomplish? A couple of different things. Maybe I wasn’t thinking one hundred percent clearly—that’s what happens when you’re completely desperate. The first thing I wanted was my house put back together again, and everything at least working—plumbing, electricity—the basics. I didn’t want to have to pay any extra money for that, either. I’d been stupid and paid Reuben up front. Stupid! Why
wouldn’t
I have, though? He had the best references in town. He’d worked for all the big bankers, all the CEOs. Everybody thought he’d done such a great job. So I dumped all the money I’d put aside for the project into Reuben’s hands right away.”

John’s eyes glowed with fury, especially when he mentioned his own stupidity. This was clearly a guy who didn’t like to mess up. The fact that Reuben had pushed him into making a huge mistake was maybe the biggest reason why John was so upset.

“At this point, the guy wouldn’t even talk to me. I knew he was going to be stuck cooking at the festival—what better time to have a captive audience?” asked John, spreading his hands out inquiringly.

“What if he still hadn’t talked to you?” asked Lulu.
“What if he ignored you or laughed at you or told you to hire a lawyer?”

“It crossed my mind that maybe I could pick up dirt on him somehow. You know, some kind of leverage against him that I could use to get him to finish up the mess he made. Maybe he was doing drugs, maybe he was having an affair with someone, maybe he was doing something that he wouldn’t want people to find out about. It seemed kind of likely to me, actually, since he was the kind of guy that might do stuff he shouldn’t do.” John shrugged. “Who knows? I wanted to see what I could find out on him or about him. And if I didn’t hear anything, I could at least wait for a moment when he was alone to talk to him about my house.”

Cherry said, “Surveillance, huh?” in a scornful voice as if she hadn’t done the same exact thing outside John’s house. “And how did that work out for you?” She had her hands on her hips. Cherry wouldn’t like the fact that she’d been tricked by John while he was hanging out with them in the booth. She’d been part of a conspiracy that she hadn’t known anything about. Cherry always wanted to know what was going on.

“Not real well, obviously,” said John. “I almost blew it by going over to the booth when that fight was going on. I was sure Reuben saw me there. Then, of course, the guy ended up dead so that didn’t help me out. Now I’m stuck.” The frustration was spilling over into his voice.
“If he’s dead, he clearly isn’t going to help me put my house back together again.”

“Or maybe,” said Cherry, still sounding annoyed. “Maybe Reuben
did
see you. Maybe when he was walking around later, he was out searching for you. Reuben was the kind of guy who could get pretty mad and he wouldn’t have been happy seeing you at the festival.”

“Maybe,” said Lulu gently, “when he caught up with you, things got out of control really quickly. You could even have started off trying to be reasonable and Reuben was the one who flew off the handle. It could be that you were even defending yourself from him. Maybe he was the one with the knife.”

John backed up. “Hey now. I didn’t kill Reuben. Why would I want to? All I wanted to do was to have the guy finish up the work that I’d paid for. If he was dead, I wasn’t going to get what I wanted.”

“Unless it’s like Lulu said,” Cherry pointed out. “He could have been acting threatening and things escalated and you were either defending yourself or it was an accident and you freaked out.”

“Neither of those things happened,” said John firmly. “I didn’t kill him. But I’m glad he’s dead.” The hate fairly dripped from his words.

“Okay,” said Cherry with a sigh. “You didn’t kill him. Fine. Did you see or hear anything during your reconnaissance mission that could help us out? Who do you think killed Reuben? Because somebody did.”

“I don’t know. And I really don’t care. He’s dead and my house is in limbo and now I’m going to have to figure out how to pull money together to finish the construction. But that Brody? I wouldn’t trust him. I’m sure y’all are convinced I’m the bad guy in all of this, but you should be considering someone like him,” said John.

“Why is that?” asked Lulu.

“When I was hanging outside his booth, I was listening to hear whether Reuben was in there or not. He clearly wasn’t, because Brody and his wife were talking very freely. They were talking about a partnership that Brody and Reuben were in—a partnership that was a total disaster. It didn’t even sound like a real partnership—it sounded to me like Brody just lent Reuben money. And Sharon was furious, believe me. She said that if Reuben needed money so bad, he should be working for it. That he spent all day lounging around in his underwear and drinking. She wasn’t real happy about their money being wasted…about as happy as I was about mine going down the drain.”

John took a deep breath, gave them both a tight smile, and said, “Look, it’s been great talking to you.” His tone was sarcastic. “Good luck finding out who killed Reuben. I’ve got to go to work. Maybe if I work hard, in a couple of years I might be able to start rebuilding the inside of my house.”

In a few seconds, he was gone.