Southern Poison (23 page)

Spud’s mouth worked some more.

I tried not to laugh. “Spud, how much was the repair bill for Fran’s Vespa scooter?”

“Almost six hundred dollars, for crying out loud. The Vespa dealer said the whole front fender and tire had to be replaced. And he claimed that my mannequin’s arm scratched the little windshield, too.”

“Well,” I said, “you got out of that one by dating Fran, so she’d pay the bill.”

“Woman’s loaded,” Spud reasoned. “She can afford it.”

“My point is, maybe you should go talk to the owner of the range. It’s a woman, right? Ask her out. Maybe your dating charms will work a second time.”

Ox smiled at me from behind the bar. Dirk ate his fish. Spud’s face grew red. Sally, the magazine lady, walked in and spotted my father. Rushing over, she greeted him warmly and asked if his sunburn hurt.

“He’s not sunburned,” Dirk said. “He’s just red from the heat.
Spud has been outside putting the finishing touches on … what’s your new sculpture called?”

“Nature’s Wrath,”
Spud muttered.

“It’s striking, Spud,” Sally said. “I don’t love it as much as the other one,
Road Rage
, but it certainly does make a statement.”

Spud’s color, starting as his forehead, inched its way back to normal. “Thanks.”

The local contracted photographer arrived shortly after Sally and the three of them went outside to gaze at the alligator. I caught a glimpse of Spud posing between the two heaps of scrap when Ruby called my name. Somebody was looking for Spud, she said, and the visitor had come through the side door so he hadn’t seen see the trio.

“I’m his daughter,” I told the man. “Can I help you?”

Dressed in casual business attire, he looked to be in his fifties, and like everyone else entering the Block, his clothes stuck to his body. Overhead, all the fans spun at full blast.

“I’m here from the insurance agency to look at Mr. Barnes’ Chrysler LHS.” He handed over a business card that declared him to be a senior insurance adjuster. “It’s my understanding that the other adjustor wasn’t quite sure what to make of the vehicle, so the case was assigned to me. Once I see the vehicle, we can get your father paid.”

Smiling, I led the man outside.

Dirk followed me. “Oh, this is going to be good.”

“Got to see this,” Ox agreed. Ruby came, too, along with a few regulars who’d been keeping up with Spud’s blooming art career.

The insurance adjuster introduced himself to Spud and did a double take at the mannequin-eating blackened alligator before turning his attention to the car. He felt some of the bullet holes and slowly walked around the crushed heap, touching the giant forked prongs that had impaled the Chrysler’s belly. An astounded expression
overcame his features. “Amazing,” he said to himself. “I never would have believed this if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”

“It
is
utterly amazing, isn’t it?” Sally said to the man. “I think the piece is really incredible. It belongs in a gallery, that’s for sure.”

Eyes jumping back and forth from Sally to the insurance adjuster, Spud’s mouth started working again, but the sounds that came out weren’t forming words.

“Excuse me?” the adjuster said. “What are you talking about Miss—?”

She stuck out her hand. “Sally Stillwell,
Eclectic Arts&Leisure
magazine.”

He shook it. “Al Hughes from Action Auto Insurance Company.”

“You’re an art enthusiast?” Sally said.

“No,” he said. “But if I was, I certainly wouldn’t want to see a totaled passenger vehicle sitting in a gallery.”

Flustered, Spud stepped between the two of them. “Er, uh, Sally, if you’ll just go inside, we can finish talking where it’s cooler. Lindsey should be here soon, for the Zerma-Ding interview. I mean Derma-Zingerview. Oh, for crying out loud. Just go inside and wait, would you?”

“Of course, Spud. But first I want to finish my conversation with this rude man.” She turned to the adjuster. “You don’t have to be so insulting, just because you don’t like the sculpture.”

Al Hughes snorted out a laugh and pointed at Spud’s car. “You call that thing a
sculpture?”

Sally took a step toward the man. “For your information,
Road Rage
could easily bring in twelve or fifteen thousand dollars, maybe more, from a serious collector. I can already envision it sitting outside a museum of modern art. Once my article prints and word gets out about the group of law enforcement officers who created it under Spud’s direction, there’s no telling who might buy it!”

The adjuster cocked his head at the mention of a dollar amount. “You mean to tell me that this… this… impaled, shot-up, twisted wreck of a Chrysler could be sold to somebody as
art
for fifteen thousand dollars?”

“Of course! Why are you so shocked?”

Al Hughes jotted something down inside a folder. “Because I am an insurance adjuster. I’m here to inspect the vehicle so my company can pay Mr. Barnes’s claim. As I understand it, his car was run over by a garbage truck while parked outside this bar, and then it was used for cover during a violent shootout. Now that I’ve seen it, we’ll haul the heap to a salvage yard and pay the estimated market value. Forty-three hundred dollars and some change.”

Sally told the photographer to stop taking pictures. “I was under the impression that the sculpture was Spud’s vision, created from scratch.”

Sally and Al studied each other for a split second. In unison, they turned to look at Spud.

“Oh, for crying out loud! It’s the car from hell!” my father said and stomped into the Block without explaining himself.

Ox
convinced everyone to sit around the same table and, once drinks and hush puppies were served, Sally and Al were laughing it up like old friends. Decked out in some of her new clothes, Lindsey joined the group and patiently waited for the magazine writer to stop flirting long enough to conduct the promised interview.

Food and drinks tend to flow much more freely when those doing the eating and drinking know it’s free, and even Dirk decided that he was off duty for the rest of the day so he could partake in a bourbon and Coke. The photographer stuck around, too, and called his girlfriend to join him. When Spud’s fan club—Bobby, Hal, Trip, and Fran—showed up, we moved an empty table to connect
with the two already pushed together. Cracker happily sauntered from human to human, collecting bites of hush puppy and shelled peanuts. After the third round of drinks and much prompting from Sally, Spud finally spilled the real story about his car. Dirk and Bobby filled in the details.

“Well Spud, I feel as though I’ve been duped,” Sally said, brushing a peanut shell from Al’s pants leg. “You’ve deceived me and my magazine.”

“You’re the one who saw the stupid car and said it was a sculpture, for crying out loud. You’re the art expert.”

She sipped on her chardonnay. “True, but you didn’t correct my assumption. And now, I’ve got an upcoming magazine with no cover story and we’re on deadline.”

Spud coughed up the piece of food he was in the process of swallowing. “You’re bumping me off the cover?”

She nodded, sipped. “I can’t, in good conscience, put an artist on the cover who is a fraud.”

“He’s not a fraud, sweetie,” Fran said. “He has a studio and everything.”

“A studio that, by his own admission, he just rented two weeks ago.”

The conversation went back and forth like this for another ten minutes. Ignoring the two women, everyone else ate and drank and made it a point to be merry. Except for Spud, who’d removed a paper menu from its plastic slip and busied himself scribbling numbers on the back side of it. Sally declared again that she would not have Spud on the cover of her publication and that her decision was final. Grinning, Lindsey pulled out a Magic Marker—sized tube of Derma-Zing and began applying a grapevine to her forearm. As Sally watched, Lindsey used a different color to draw tiny daisies where the grapes should be. Smartly, the teen remained silent and waited for Sally to come up with the idea.

“Derma-Zing will be the cover!” Sally said, touching Al on the knee. She instructed the photographer that his assignment had changed and told him to get the girl. Within minutes, two portable lights with umbrella-looking canopies were erected on tripods and he began snapping shots of Lindsey and her arm from different angles.

Spud finished scribbling on the paper and slunk in his chair. “Seventeen thousand dollars! That stupid car is going to cost me almost seventeen thousand bucks.”

The rest of us were wise enough not to ask, but Bobby had to know the details. Arms flying overhead, Spud rattled off a list of expenditures: supplies for the new sculpture including the possessed alligator, his studio rental, business cards, repairs to the shooting range clubhouse, and the cost of taking Fran out to dinner, twice.

“If it will make you feel any better, Mr. Barnes, you’ll be receiving a settlement check shortly.” Al produced a calculator and calculated. “Forty-three hundred and thirty-two dollars.”

“That won’t even buy me a decent new car,” Spud muttered.

“You don’t really need a new car,” Lindsey theorized, “since you can’t see to drive and they took away your license. Right?” Nobody else at the table could have gotten away with voicing it.

“They took away your driver’s license?” Fran said, rubbing Spud’s back. “Poor thing. They wanted to take mine, too, but one of the ladies in my bridge club forged a report from the eye doctor so I could get it renewed.”

“I didn’t hear that,” Dirk said, and drank.

“I’m the proud holder of a valid driver’s license,” Fran continued, “and I’ll give you a ride anytime.”

Spud’s spine straightened and he turned on his girlfriend. “That’s why you mowed down my mannequin and got her hand stuck in your wheel! Because you didn’t see her! And you gave me a repair bill for nearly a thousand damn dollars.”

“But you didn’t have to pay it, remember?” Fran smiled and the skin around her sparkling eyes crinkled. “You took me out to dinner, instead.”

Al Hughes thanked Ox for the hospitality and stood. “This has been a most interesting afternoon, folks, but I’ve got to get going. About your uh, car-sculpture, Mr. Barnes, a tow truck will be here tomorrow to haul it to the salvage yard. But if you’d like, you’re welcome to buy it back from the insurance company for six hundred and seventy-five dollars. That’s the salvage value. If you want to do so, I need to know now, before it’s hauled off.”

Fran raised her hand, as though at an auction. “I’ll take it, for seven hundred dollars even.”

Al’s shoulders went up. “What the heck. Sold, for seven hundred dollars.”

Excited, Fran kissed Spud, telling him that he’d just sold his very first sculpture. A real sculpture!

Just to make a point, Sally argued that a sale didn’t qualify something as art.

Al closed his notebook. “The car is Miss Cutter’s now, Sally. She can call it the
Mobile Mona Lisa
for all I care.”

Not offended, Sally laughed. After exchanging phone numbers with her, the insurance adjuster left. Lindsey got her interview. And, with Fran fawning over him, Spud got drunk.

I recognized the
number on the caller ID and wondered what Lady Lizzy wanted with me. “Hello?”

“Dahling!” she drawled, sounding like her normal exclamatory self. “I was wondering if your agency could accept some bodyguard work on short notice.”

Surely she knew that I didn’t really offer personal bodyguard services. Heck, if anyone needed a bodyguard right now,
I
did. “I don’t think so, Lady Lizzy, but I can recommend someone. How short of a notice are we talking?”

“For an event tonight!”

I doubted I could get anyone that quickly, I told her, but Lizzy plowed on. She’d received a nasty letter, she explained, in which the writer threatened to cut her—as in, literally slice her with a knife—at tonight’s “Slasher Soiree.” A private party and advance viewing of a new horror movie, the event would draw a few hundred people.

“I get threats and crazy e-mails all the time!” the gossip columnist said. “But this one seems serious. He demanded a retraction of
something I insinuated about his girlfriend, and when I didn’t do it, I got this letter about the party tonight. And I can’t
not
go!”

“You obviously know the identity of this person. Have you contacted the police?”

“I certainly have! They sent an officer to talk to the man and he claimed he didn’t know anything about it. But I’m scared. This creep has me shaking so badly, I can’t put on my own mascara.”

In her world that amounted to a crisis. I could ask JJ or Rita to babysit Lizzy, but that would be the equivalent of asking them to detail my car, an especially punishing task since I now drive a hearse. Ox and I had already planned to spend the evening together, away from the Block, to talk. On the other hand, I did owe Lady Lizzy a favor, sort of. I had to strong-arm the information out of her, but it did lead to saving many lives. It wouldn’t be too horrible for me to babysit Lizzy for a few hours, if I could talk Ox into going. We’d get to preview a horror flick, have a drink, and then we could go somewhere quiet to talk.

“Tell you what, Lizzy. As a
personal favor
to you, I will go to the party and bring a friend. We’ll keep an eye on things.” If anyone knew the rules of the favor game, she did. Business favors were tokens to be accumulated and redeemed. And I might need her help again someday.

“Fabulous! I’ll put you and a plus one on the guest list.” She gave me the address and asked if I could be there at six for the cocktail hour.

A
small crowd had already gathered at St. Thomas Preservation Hall on Dock Street when Ox and I arrived. Film-screening parties are always an eclectic mix, from gaffers wearing fashionably ripped blue jeans to gem-studded celebs. I used the occasion as an excuse to deck out in a provocatively low-cut dress with just enough flare
in the skirt to conceal a thigh holster. My spiked heels weren’t ideal bodyguard attire, but they looked damn good. Ox wore a pair of slacks with a white silk tee and lightweight summer blazer that nicely covered his Kimber.45 automatic. I’m sure there was a knife somewhere on his body, too. Seeing him, people stared a bit longer than was polite, probably thinking he was somebody important that they should recognize.