Slow Dollar (21 page)

“Pulls them in, though, doesn’t it?” I said, watching young men line up to try their luck at setting the bells and whistles off again.

“That’s the whole point,” Tally said with a resigned shrug.

One of her customers called for change, another was ready to cash in her prize chips. While we waited for her to come back, I glanced around the end of the tent where little children were splashing their hands in the water, trying for prizes at the duck pond. Across the way, a teenager was demonstrating to potential customers how easy it was to climb the rope ladder to reach the prizes at the top.

From the other side of the Dozer tent came the entrancing odor of fried dough sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. I was ready to follow my nose when Tally returned. Someone else immediately claimed her attention, though.

“Hey, Tal?”

A rough-looking man, late forties probably, with bloodshot eyes, full tattoos on both arms, and a day’s growth of whiskers leaned wearily against the end of the Dozer.

“Sam? When did you get in?” Tally said. “Did you get them?”

“Yeah, Arnie’s there. You seen Polly? How come she didn’t open up tonight?”

Dwight and I followed their eyes across the crowd to where Polly’s Plate Pitch was still dark and shuttered.

“She ain’t in the trailer and the girls say they ain’t seen her all day, neither.”

Tally shook her head. “I don’t know, Sam. It’s been so crazy here. You want to go ahead and open it up for me?”

“I’ll open it, but I can’t work it. I missed some of the road markers coming in and got turned around, wasted an hour. I gotta go get some sleep, Tal. I nearly run off the road just before I got here.”

“That’s okay, I’ll find somebody. Here, Deborah,” she said, untying her money apron and handing it to me. “Mind the Dozer for me a minute? Make change? If anybody wants to cash in for a prize, ask them to wait or come back later, okay?”

“Hey, wait!” I called. “I don’t think—”

Too late. She had disappeared into the crowd, leaving me holding the bag in the shape of a money apron.

“I don’t think this is something appropriate for a judge to be doing,” I told Dwight, who just shook his head in amusement.

“Don’t look at me, shug. If it’s bad for a judge, think about a deputy sheriff.”

“Oh, well. She’ll probably be back before anybody wants anything.”

We stood there by the Dozer and watched as the man went over, pulled some keys from his pocket, and began unlocking the flaps. One part folded down to reveal the words POLLY’S PLATE PITCH in bright red letters. The other part folded up and locked into place. It was lined with small multicolored lights that began chasing themselves as soon as he flipped a switch. Stacks of shiny plates in all colors and sizes gleamed beneath the lights. The game is a simple one: You just toss a quarter onto any plate. If it stays in the plate, then you could win one of the large stuffed animals dangling from a rod in the back. After surfing some of the carnival sites on the web yesterday morning, I had learned that the harder it is to win, the bigger and nicer the prizes.

Skee Matusik’s Lucky Ducky next door was a play-till-you-win with every player a winner. His prizes probably cost him a dime at the most. Same with the balloon race across from him. But the Bowler Roller, Polly’s Plate Pitch, and the rope climb next to it all had big prizes, so I knew they had to be a lot harder than they looked.

“Change, please!” someone called from the Dozer, and I stepped up into the well of the wagon, took the woman’s two dollar bills, and handed back eight quarters from Tally’s money apron.

It was fascinating to stand back here and watch quarters tumble over the side spills into the baskets beneath each station. I had a vague idea that the Harvest Festival Committee was supposed to get a percentage of the carnival’s take, but how was it decided? The honor system? I found myself thinking about cash-only businesses and the IRS. No paper trails here. How would the government go about guessing how much money the games on this lot took in? ‘Course that line of logic’s what got my daddy into trouble with the IRS all those years ago. He was never convicted for making or distributing white lightning. No, his conviction was for income tax evasion.

“I’m ready to cash in,” said a man’s pompous voice from the other side, a voice I recognized at once.

Reluctantly, I looked over the countertop and saw a startled Paul Archdale, the attorney who’d probably be running for my seat in the next election.

“Judge? Judge Knott?” Disbelief and disapproval were in his eyes. “What on earth are you doing in there?”

“Research,” I said blandly. “I thought I ought to see what goes on behind the scenes at a carnival so I can better understand why some of our rowdier citizens flip out. What about you?”

“Supporting the festival,” he said with returning righteousness.

He tried to hand me the poker chips he’d collected. I knew there was a system for equating chips with prizes, but I didn’t have a clue what it was.

“My goodness,” I told Paul. “You have supported the festival here tonight if you’ve played long enough to get that many chips.”

He flushed and muttered something about getting lucky.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to come back in about ten minutes when the owner’s here,” I said. “I have no idea how the prizes work.”

Archdale huffed away impatiently.

Dwight was leaning against the end of the Dozer with a broad grin on his face. “Research?”

I shrugged. “All I could think of.”

Across the way, the man Tally called Sam finished opening the booth just as Tally reappeared with a young woman who didn’t look much older than sixteen or seventeen.

We saw her giving the girl last-minute instructions, then the man left them with a weary wave of his hand and headed toward the trailer area. The girl stepped into the booth and smiled at the people who had immediately paused to play the simple-looking game.

Tally started back through the throng to join us. Before she’d gotten halfway to us, though, screams pierced the air. Even the music pulsing through the loudspeakers was no match for the girl’s terror. Plates went crashing as she stumbled from the booth, wide-eyed and gibbering and pointing to the huge stuffed pandas and Sesame Street characters hanging at the back.

Dwight rushed over and I followed.

There among the prizes hung the body of a woman with bright red hair.

Polly Viscardi.

It was a repeat of Friday night, only this time it was me, not Sylvia Clayton, that Dwight was telling he’d see the next day. Unlike Sylvia, though, I didn’t split right away.

The carnival was immediately closed down, of course, much to Paul Archdale’s dismay. As soon as the announcement came over the loudspeakers asking people to please clear the lot, he marched straight up to me and demanded his prize.

“Prize?” I was outraged. “Paul, someone’s just been killed here.”

“Yeah, and I’m real sorry about that,” he said stubbornly, “but I dropped thirty-seven dollars on this game and I’m not leaving without my prize.”

“How many chips you got, Mister?” Tally said from inside the Dozer. “Four? Okay, here you go.”

From the prize rack over her head, she unclipped a bubble pack that held a bright yellow-and-black submersible flashlight that looked like a knockoff of a name brand.

As he walked away somewhat mollified, I muttered, “And may he use it to illuminate a place where the sun don’t shine.”

Tally shot me a startled glance and gave an involuntary giggle. “And here I thought you were from the high-class side of the family.”

“Don’t make any snap calls till you meet the rest of them,” I said, and went around to the front to start folding down the sides for her.

All around us, the other game stands were being closed down, too, as uniforms took over the lot again, canvassing all the operators, asking if anyone had seen anything before Polly’s body was discovered. Patrol cars with flashing red and blue lights had converged on the midway till the EMS truck could barely squeeze past. Instead of loudspeakers with music and handheld mikes with pitches, the night air crackled with radioed dispatches.

Down at the gate, a news van with a mobile transmitter had appeared and I saw someone from the Dobbs
Ledger
. I suspected that the media would be taking a second carnival death more seriously than the first time around.

The man from the Bowler Roller had finished shutting up quickly, and when he came over to help tie down the tent flaps, Tally introduced us. “Deborah, this is Windy Raines. Believe it or not, Windy, she’s my aunt.”

“Really? Now, how come I don’t have any aunts like you?” he said, leering rakishly, a leer spoiled by the fact that he was missing a couple of teeth and was probably nearing sixty.

“Behave yourself,” Tally warned. “Her boyfriend’s that deputy sheriff over there.”

I started to say Dwight wasn’t my boyfriend, then remembered that well, yes, he was. It was going to take some getting used to.

Across the way, the crimescene van was back. Yellow tape looped around the Plate Pitch and floodlights lit up the interior till the stacks of glassware blazed in the glare. Beyond the hood of a patrol car, I saw Dwight in the center of a knot of men, both uniforms and civilians. I recognized Arnold Ames, Dennis Koffer, Skee Matusik, and a couple of prominent men who were on the county’s festival committee. A moment later, they were joined by an unfamiliar heavyset man who listened silently as Ames and Koffer appeared to be bringing him up to speed.

“Ralph Ferlanski,” Tally told me. “The other owner. He owns the Ferris wheel and Tilt-A-Whirl and the swings.”

“And the generators,” Windy reminded her with a hint of bitterness in his tone.

“And the generators,” she agreed equably, not letting herself get drawn into whatever problem he had with the other owner.

“God, this is bad as a hurricane,” said Skee Matusik, who had evidently been invited to take himself away from the Plate Pitch area. “They’re saying tomorrow may be dark, too.”

“The hell you say!” Windy Raines exclaimed. “How they expect us to make our nut?”

“The teenagers’ll be back for you guys,” Matusik said bitterly, “but I might as well go on and make the jump now. Nobody’s gonna bring the kiddies out to a place where somebody’s getting killed every time you turn around.”

Tally’s jaw tightened, and I looked down at the scrawny little man coldly. “In case you’ve forgotten, Tally’s son is one of those people who got killed, and I’m sure he didn’t lie down and die just so you could have a bad day. Any more than that poor woman over there.”

“Oh, hey, Tal! I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean it like that. Polly and me, we might not’ve got along, but you know how much Irene and me loved Braz.”

“It’s okay,” she said wearily.

“Lord, lordy,” said Raines. “Polly gone, too. Midway’s not gonna be the same without that redheaded spitfire keeping the ashes stirred.”

We finished securing the Dozer and tying the tent flaps closed.

Thanks to Dwight, I found myself sneaking close looks at their footgear. Tonight all three wore those unisex leather work shoes with thick soles. Raines’s were calf high lumberjacks, laced with leather strings, while Tally’s were regular low-tops laced with round cords. Matusik’s were ankle-high with regular brown laces that stopped two holes short of the top pair. His and Tally’s shoes left ridge patterns in the dirt, but Raines’s were so old that if they’d ever had a tread, they were now too worn to show. On the other hand, they didn’t seem to have been cleaned lately and the discolorations looked like normal dirt and grease to me. Certainly no huge blotches of dried blood on the dark brown leather to say they’d stomped a young man to death three nights ago.

Having finished with the Dozer, Tally moved on to the ears-and-floss wagon next door, but the two young women working there—Candy and Tasha—had everything under control, they said, and were almost finished. Both were teary over Polly’s death.

“They bunked in together,” Tally told me as I followed her down to their other grab wagon, the one that sold corn dogs and cold drinks. “Candy, Tasha, Eve, and Kay. Kay’s the one found her. They bunk at one end of the trailer next to us, and Polly and Sam bunked at the other end. Polly’s been like their den mother this time out.”

We found the other grab wagon empty and abandoned. Tally wasn’t surprised.

“Towners!” she muttered, swinging up into the wagon. “Eve and Kay were working this one alone because our regular cook’s been stoned since Friday afternoon, but I had to pull Eve off yesterday to work the Guesser, so we hired someone local to help Kay. Then tonight when I pulled Kay off to cover for Polly, the new girl said she could handle it. Everything was all made. She would’ve had to keep moving, but really, there’s nothing to it. Looks like she took off the minute we left, though.”

She checked the money box beneath the counter. Empty. “Another no surprise,” Tally said grimly.

The window counters and grill were a mess.

There was a bucket of clean soapy water under one of the counters. I hung my jacket on the outside knob, stepped up into the wagon, squeezed out the dishcloth, and got busy.

“What are you doing?” Tally asked. “You’ll wreck your clothes.”

“They’re washable,” I said, glad that I’d chosen to wear a cotton pantsuit and low shoes this morning.

“But you’re a judge.”

“So? I’m also a pair of hands, and you can use some help.”

While she turned off the grease vat, stowed the food in a refrigerated chest under the counter, and moved stuff out of my way, I washed off everything that felt greasy or sticky. We made a good team. There’s something about working together that lets down the roadblocks and fosters trust. Soon she was telling me about Polly Viscardi.

“We’ve known her for years, Arnie and me. She and Irene were good friends, too, but this is the first time she’d traveled with us. She was a player, all right.”

“How do you mean?”

“You met her, didn’t you?”

“Not really. We tossed a few quarters at her plates, but I can never get anything to stick, and then I saw her with you Friday night.” I remembered bright red hair, the pink laces on her shoes, and that off-the-shoulder ruffled blouse as she flirted with the men in our party to encourage them to keep tossing quarters. “She seemed...” I tried to find the right words. “I don’t know. She looked very feminine, but I felt she might be sort of hard underneath?”

“That was Polly, all right. She had an eye for anything in pants, but they didn’t get in
her
pants unless she saw a use for them. Like poor old Sam. He was just a roughie at the beginning of the season and she was shacking with Mike, our cook. Then one day, boom! Mike was back in the bunkhouse and Sam was in her bed, okay? I don’t think either of them knew what hit ‘em.”

“How did Mike take it?”

“You mean was he the one killed Polly?”

“Scorned lover? Jealousy?”

“Scorned and jealous, yeah. Do anything about it? Nah. Just kept getting stoned. Eve took it worse.”

“Eve?”

“She’s Mike’s daughter. I don’t think she was pissed at Polly so much for dumping her dad as because he quit pulling his full weight here and that made more work for her and Kay.” She put the mustard jars in the ice chest. “And of course, Tasha was with Sam before Polly moved in on him.”

“Really?” That fresh-faced kid I’d just met at the floss wagon and the road-worn Sam?

“Sam’s got a great sense of humor,” Tally said. “And he’s dependable. You get to appreciate things like that when you’re out here on the road.”

“Who else didn’t like Polly?”

“Well, you heard Skee. No love lost there. She didn’t think he did all he could for Irene before she died and she got mad because Irene was barely in the ground good before he moved another woman into their doublewide, somebody who took him for almost everything he and Irene’d built up together. By the time that little possum belly queen did a rake ‘em and scrape ‘em on him, all he had left was his camper truck and his Lucky Ducky. And Polly wasn’t above rubbing it in about what a jackass he’d been. Like some juicy young thing was going to love him for himself alone.”

My nose wrinkled as I thought of the woman who could crawl in beside Skee Matusik’s scrawny body or kiss that nearly toothless mouth. “Some men don’t ever take a good look in the mirror. Don’t you reckon she earned whatever she got from him?”

Tally sighed. “Maybe she did. But when I think how hard it was for Irene out here on the road with her bad heart and all, and then to have some little whore walk away with everything she’d worked for? I tell you, if it hadn’t been for Braz, we wouldn’t have let Skee book in with us this season. But Irene was good to him and he knew she’d feel bad if Skee went down the slop chutes, so he talked me into it.”

“Anybody else have problems with Polly?” I asked.

She was silent for a moment and I didn’t push it. Just kept scrubbing.

“Oh, well, hell, doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Your deputy’s probably snapped to it already. It was Braz, okay? They didn’t get along worth a damn. And don’t ask me why. I don’t think it was over Skee, though, ‘cause he used to razz Skee about that little bitch, too. Braz was another that thought women couldn’t resist him. Maybe he came on to her and she slapped him down too hard? I didn’t ask and they didn’t bring it to Arn or me. Sometimes it’s better not to know stuff when you’re going to be living this close with somebody for the season.”

She sighed. “Val and me, we went over and picked out his casket this afternoon. The last thing we’ll ever do for him. Poor Braz. I should have made more time for him. Been a better mother.”

All I could do was make consoling noises. There are never any easy words.

By now, the wagon was almost spotless. I rinsed out the dishcloth I’d been using, then went and dumped the bucket in the weeds behind a shuttered balloon-bust stand while Tally turned off the lights and closed down the flaps.

“Thanks,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

“Hey, what’s family for?” I said, draping my jacket around my shoulders.

She turned and looked at me steadily. “You’re not just shitting me, are you? You really mean it.”

“I mean it.” I looked straight back into those blue eyes. “I made a promise almost twenty years ago that you would be part of our family if you ever wanted to be.”

“To your mother?”

I nodded.

“Do you know, I only saw her that one time, but I still remember her as if it was last week. She was the nicest woman I’d ever met.” She finished locking the wagon. “You don’t know what it meant to me when she put that bracelet on my wrist and it was just like yours. I mean, you were her daughter, so sure, you’d have a pretty one. But mine was just as pretty and shiny. And that candy! No chocolates I’ve ever had since tasted as good as what she gave me that day.”

“Till the day she died, she was sorry she didn’t just put you in the car and bring you home with us,” I said. “She went back a week later with Andrew, but you were gone.”

Tally’s face lit up. “Did she really? Because she promised she’d come back to see me, and when my mom came to take me away, I told her I couldn’t go till Mama Sue came—that’s what she told me to call her, okay? Soon as I said that, Mom slapped me and said I’d been played for a fool. That your mother never had any intention of coming back.” She shrugged. “I always wondered.”

“Oh, Tally,” I said helplessly, my eyes misting over.

If Mother had followed her first instinct, Tally would still be Olivia and we would have grown up together like sisters. Life would have been so different for her. No baby at fifteen. College. A settled life instead of gypsying from town to town. Different for me, too, maybe. She would have been there for both of us when Mother was dying. And she was just enough older that she might have kept me between the ditches instead of taking it off road, straight through the underbrush.