Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 10 (2 page)

“Excuse me,” said an old lady with a cane, “but could you tell me where you keep the toothpicks? I’ve been up and down all the aisles.”

Kevin replaced the pack and gallantly escorted her to the right spot. Rather than return to the mop, however, he dug a dime out of his pocket and went to use the pay phone in the employees’ lounge.

He waited patiently for a dozen rings, imagining his beloved heaving herself off the couch and moving majestically across the room. A stranger peering through the window might not guess she was within weeks of having a baby. What weight she’d gained blended right in with the three hundred odd pounds there’d been of her to begin with, and she’d refused to wear outfits with storks and cute messages about the current location of the baby. Kevin’s ma had found one that might have fit, but Dahlia’d turned up her nose and kept on wearing her regular clothes.

“What?” she growled into the receiver.

Kevin realized he might have interrupted her in the middle of one of her soap operas. “Nothing, my sweetums. I just wanted to call and ask how you was doing. Is there anything I can bring home this evening?”

“You know darn well I’m on this awful diet. What are you gonna do if I ask you to bring home two gallons of ice cream and a carton of Twinkies?”

He gulped unhappily. “I was thinking more of crunchy celery and that real tasty low-fat yogurt.” His beetlish brow, common in varying degrees to all members of the Buchanon clan, crinkled as he struggled to make amends for setting her off again. “Or a magazine! The new issues just came in this morning. I don’t recollect exactly, but I think there’s one with ideas to decorate a nursery.”

“When am I supposed to sew curtains and paint stencils on the wall?” she said with a drawn-out sigh of pure misery. “I have to poke my poor finger four times a day on account of this diabetes. The sight of my blood bubbling up makes me sick to my stomach, so I have to get a sugar-free soda pop and lie down until I stop feeling queasy. Then I haft to listen to that tape they gave us and make silly noises. When I’m not doing that, your ma’s hauling me to the clinic so I can put on a paper dress and wait until that weasel of a doctor finds time to pull on plastic gloves and smear petroleum jelly on-“

“I gotta get back to work,” Kevin said as his knees buckled and sweat flooded his armpits. “Why don’t you have yourself a nice nap on the sofa? After all, you’re sleeping for two.”

He made it back to the mop and bucket, but it was a long while before he started sloshing dirty water down the aisle.

/\
/\
/\

“Am I disturbing you?” asked Kayleen Smeltner as she came into the PD and paused, her expression cautious.

I put aside my pocketknife and the block of balsa wood I was trying to coerce into resembling a marshland mallard. I keep it in a bottom desk drawer for those stretches of time when the rigors of upholding the law in Maggody are less than burdensome. Some peculiar things have happened since the day I arrived home to pull myself back together after the divorce, but mostly I run a speed trap out at the edge of town, pull teenagers over for reckless driving, beg the miserly town council for money, and try to stay in my mother’s good graces by pretending that my only goal in life is to acquire another husband, a vine-covered cottage, and a lifetime subscription to TV Guide.

In her dreams, not mine.

“Have a seat,” I said to Kayleen. “The bank robbery’s not scheduled until five o’clock, and the extraterrestrial invasion won’t start until midnight.”

She sat down on the edge of the chair across from my desk and unbuttoned her coat. “Maggody doesn’t have a bank.”

“I know,” I said. “It doesn’t have a landing pad, either.” I’d met Kayleen at the bar, of course, in that I was in there two or three times a day, sometimes four if I made happy hour. She appeared to be in her early forties, maybe ten or twelve years older than me. Her makeup might have been a tad heavy-handed, but it went well with her long, wavy blond hair and slightly masculine features. She was nearly six feet tall and carried a few extra pounds beneath well-tailored silk and linen dresses. The leers and wolf-whistles that greeted her in the barroom implied the overall effect was that of a 1940s Hollywood sex goddess.

She finally gave up trying to figure out what I’d said and relaxed. “I want to give you a copy of my license to buy and sell firearms, just so you’ll know everything’s legal. I applied for it a few months after Maurice was killed.”

“Maurice?” I echoed.

“Everybody called him Mo, but I always called him Maurice on account of how sexy it sounded, like he was from France instead of Neosho, Missouri.” She took a tissue out of her purse and dabbed the corner of her eye. “He left me his gun collection. I had to sell it, and I found out real quick that dealers end up with most of the profit. Pretty soon I had a brisk business going, some mail-order but most of it out of my home. When I got tired of having strangers tromp through my living room, I decided to open a pawnshop. This way I can keep my private life separate from my business one.”

I leaned back in the worn cane-bottomed chair and asked the question that had been buzzing around town like a deranged hornet. “Why Maggody? Wouldn’t you do better in a larger town? The only walk-in trade you’ll get here is from the drunks across the street at the pool hall, and I doubt any of them owns anything of value. Traffic consists of tourists heading north for the country music halls of Branson, or heading south for the self-conscious quaintness of Eureka Springs. The only reason anyone slows down going through here is to throw litter out the car window. If anyone actually stopped, we’d all go outside to stare.”

“I stopped here once upon a time,” she said in a dreamy voice. “I was on my honeymoon. Jodie and I were fresh out of high school, driving an old car his grandfather had given us, down to our last few dollars. We didn’t care, though. We were heading for Texas when we had a flat tire four or five miles down the road from here. It turned out the spare tire was flat, too, and Jodie was setting off to walk back to Maggody when this man pulled up. He drove Jodie to a gas station to get the tire fixed, then brought him back and insisted we stay for supper. It was the kindest thing anyone’s anyone’s done in my whole life. I guess I’ve thought about coming back here ever since then.”

“What happened to Jodie?”

This time she put the tissue to serious use. “We scraped together enough money to put a down payment on a little farm west of Texarkana. Less than a year later, Jodie was killed when the truck he was working on slipped off the jack and crushed his chest. I was pregnant at the time, and miscarried the next day. I couldn’t stand living in the house filled with his memories, so I sold the property and moved to Dallas. Sometimes I pull out my old high school yearbooks and look at his picture, wondering what my life would have been like if …”

I was touched, although not to the point of asking to borrow her soggy tissue. “I still think you may regret opening a business here,” I said to change the subject before she whipped out wedding pictures (or an urn filled with ashes). “And you may regret buying the Wockermann property, too. The reason the house is in such disrepair is that it’s been empty for a couple of years. The real estate market’s not booming in this neck of the woods. It’s not even pinging.”

“Maurice left me enough to get by on,” Kayleen said with a small smile. “I’ll have my mail-order business, although I guess I’ll have to drive into Farberville to use the post office there. Besides, big cities are frightening these days. You don’t know your neighbors. If you need something fixed, you have to let a stranger come inside your house. He could be a rapist, or a psychotic, or even a government agent.”

“A government agent?”

“You never can tell. These are dangerous times we live in, Arly. Don’t think for a minute that the government doesn’t know how much money you make and how you spend it down to the last penny-and I’m not talking just about taxes. They know who you talk to on the telephone and get mail from, and which organizations you belong to.”

I raised my eyebrows. “There’re more than two hundred and sixty million people in this country. I can’t imagine the government keeping tabs on all of them. Mobsters and drug dealers, maybe-but not ordinary citizens. Why would they bother?”

She gave me what I suppose she thought was a meaningful look, although it didn’t mean diddlysquat to me. “Keep in mind that the media are regulated by the government, so they can’t say things that might expose what’s happening in this country. Come by the shop and I’ll show you some interesting material about what you can expect sometime down the road.”

“Okay,” I said uneasily, then took a shot at changing the subject once again. “Maurice was your second husband?”

She promptly teared up again. “He was murdered a little more than a year ago.”

“Murdered?” I said, mentally kicking myself for bringing up another painful topic. “What happened?”

“One night we heard glass break downstairs. Maurice took the thirty-eight from the bedside table and went to investigate. Three shots were fired. I called the police, then went to the top of the stairs. I saw men run out the front door, but it was too dark to get a good look. All I could tell the police was that there were three of them, wearing dark coats and ski masks. I’ve had some training as a practical nurse, but there was nothing I could do to help Maurice. He bled to death before the ambulance arrived.”

“Were the men caught?”

Kayleen grimaced and shook her head. “The police interviewed all the local ne’er-do-wells, but nobody was acting guilty or bragging in the bars. I think the men must have been from Springfield or maybe Kansas City. Maurice was a well-known gun collector. He advertised in magazines, and we used to go to shows as far away as Chicago and Houston and Santa Fe. It wouldn’t take a college degree to figure out there’d be valuable guns in the house.”

I resisted the urge to launch into a lecture that would not amuse card-carrying members of the NRA. Sure, I have a gun (and a box with three bullets), but I keep it locked away in a filing cabinet in the back room. I’m a cop, after all, and may be called upon one of these days to shoot a rabid skunk or an Elvis impersonator. I can’t imagine myself shooting much of anything else, even though Hizzoner the Moron has tried my patience on occasion.

I settled for a vaguely sympathetic smile. “It doesn’t sound like you’ve had much luck with husbands.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of living alone,” she said as she stood up, buttoned her coat, and pulled on hand-sewn leather gloves. “I need to run out to the house and find out if the electrician ever showed up. I just thought it’d be nice if you and I got better acquainted.”

“Drop by any old time,” I said, my fingers crossed in my lap. She seemed perfectly nice, if a little bit odd about wily government agents. A little bit odd barely rates a mention in a county with Buchanons as plentiful as cow patties in a pasture.

I watched her drive away in a creamy brown car, genus Mercedes, species unfamiliar. I turned off the coffee pot, collected my radar gun, balsa wood, and pocket knife, and was almost out the door when the telephone rang. Despite my instincts to keep on going, I turned back to answer it.

“Get yourself over here,” whispered a voice I recognized as that of the proprietress of Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill.

“I can’t,” I whispered back. “I have to nab speeders at the edge of town so I can earn my minuscule salary at the end of the month. Maybe later, okay?”

“You got to come right this instant, missy.”

I was going to inquire into the nature of the emergency when I realized I was listening to a dial tone. It could have been an armed robbery, I supposed, but it was more likely to be a mouse in the pantry or a snag in her panty hose. My mother dishes out melodrama as generously as she does peach cobbler.

I left the radar gun on the desk, and ambled down the road, pausing to wave at my landlord, Roy Stiver, who was hauling a spindly lamp into his antiques store. I live in an efficiency apartment apartment upstairs, although I’ve begun to wonder if I ought to find something less cramped. It had seemed just fine when I first arrived from Manhattan, even though it was quite a step down from a posh condominium with a view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. My current residence has a view of the pool hall and a couple of vacant buildings with yellowed newspapers taped across the windows. It also has cigarette burns in the linoleum, mildew on the walls, and a toilet that creaks to itself in the night.

As a temporary refuge, it was adequate. I sure as hell hadn’t planned to stay any longer than it took to let my bruised ego recover from the divorce. Now it seemed as though I’d never left town, that the blurred memories of cocktail parties and art galleries were nothing more than scenes from a movie I’d seen somewhere.

Shivering, I went into the barroom to find out what, if anything, had provoked the call. The provocation certainly had not come from the trucker snoring in the corner booth, or from the rednecks in the next booth, who were arguing about breeds of hunting dogs.

This narrowed it down to a lone figure on a stool by the bar. There were no antennas bobbling above his head, and he was wearing a camouflage jacket instead of a sequined suit from the Graceland souvenir store. Ruby Bee was standing in front of him, listening while she dried a beer mug with a towel. I couldn’t quite decipher her expression; she was nodding politely, but there was a certain rigidity to her features that suggested she was keeping her opinions to herself.

Which was unusual, to put it mildly. When she saw me, she dropped the towel and chirped, “Here’s Arly. She took her sweet time getting here, but that doesn’t mean she’s not interested in meeting you. Did I mention she happens to be the chief of police here in Maggody? The mayor’s wife was real annoyed when the town council hired her, but there wasn’t a line of candidates begging for the job.” She took a much needed breath as I came to a stop at the edge of the dance floor. “I was just telling General Pitts about you, honey. He’s in town to visit Kayleen, but she’s not out back in her room.”