Too Dead To Dance (2 page)

He flipped the phone shut
and stuck his head in the door. “Stan, get out of there, the cops
are on their way.”

In a few minutes, the
taller EMT swaggered out of the building, slapping his hands
together just as a squad car sped into the fairgrounds, lights
whirling. It came to a grinding halt two feet from where the Fest
Meister and I sat.

2

A large black man in a
cheap rumpled suit heaved himself out of the passenger side of the
car. I stood up as he ambled toward me. “Mrs. Heinz, don’t tell me
you’re the one who found this body?”

I had met Lieutenant Delmar
Jacobs a few months ago when I had a break-in at my coffee
warehouse. “I’m afraid so. And it’s terrible. I wish I didn’t have
that picture in my head. But please call me Jennifer. It’s not
Heinz anymore, either. I took back my maiden name,
Penny.”

“Okay, Ms. Penny. Can you
wait here while we check this out?”

I heard a car door slam and
glanced over to the driver’s side of the squad car. A gorgeous dark
haired man with a compact body strode toward us. I could see that,
although not more than 5’9”, his solid build gave him a look of
formidability. He looked down at me. I’m short. Everyone looks down
at me.

“Detective Jerry Decker,”
he said sticking out his hand to shake mine. When I grasped his
hand, a little shock went through mine. He felt it too, I
thought.

“So, you knew the victim,
Ma’am?”

Ma’am? I thought. Did he
say Ma’am? Did I look like a Ma’am? I looked him right in the eye,
ready to tell him off. His eyes were light brown, like coffee
diluted with cream. When I got a whiff of his musky after-shave, my
knees went weak and I almost fell.

“Are you okay, Ms. Penny?”
Lieutenant Jacobs grabbed my arm. “Maybe you should sit
down.”

“No, no. I’m fine.” I
straightened up and took a deep breath. I moved around until my
back was to the building so neither man could see my damp
posterior. “I don’t know who that man in there is. I’ve never seen
him before.”

Detective Decker, the
aromatic cop, looked at me with a tiny smile pulling at the sides
of his mouth. “You touch anything in there?”

I started to say something
snotty to him but when I looked up at him my knees waffled again.
What the hell was going on here? How could this sexy man have such
an effect on me? It must have been purely physical because I didn’t
even know him.

I had been married for more
than twenty years. I didn’t know how to interact with a man at this
level. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to. It was probably just the
shock of seeing a dead man that had my emotions all messed
up.

Lieutenant Jacobs took my
arm and helped me back to the park bench. “You sit here while
Detective Decker and I go take a look. Jerry, call the State boys
and get their Forensics Team out here.”

Detective Decker whipped
his cell phone out of a leather case hooked to his belt like an old
western sheriff drawing his gun. He snapped open the phone and hit
a speed dial number. Before he turned away, he winked at me. Winked
at me! I began to tell him off when my stomach did a flip and a
gurgle. “Oh,” I whispered to my stomach and knees “stop that. I
don’t think I’m ready for this.”

Vendors began to arrive to
open their booths. When a group of them gathered at the entrance
started mumbling about the delay, Lieutenant Jacobs came out of the
building. Raising both hands for quiet, he said, “There’s been an
incident. This building will be closed for the day. It’ll reopen
tomorrow, if we’re finished.”

Jacobs looked at me and
said, “Who has the booth next to yours? The one closest to the
door.”

“That lady wearing the blue
dirndl.” I pointed out a stout fortyish lady in the group of
vendors. I had met her yesterday, the first day of the festival.
“Her name is Trudy.”

“Thanks, Ms. Penny. Sit
tight. I’ll be back to talk to you in a little while.”

Jacobs went over and talked
quietly to Trudy. He escorted her into the building, his huge ebony
hand gently touching her back. In a few seconds, we heard a
shriek.

More deputies arrived and
two of them wound the yellow crime scene tape around a large tree
and brought it across the broad doors, anchoring it to a drainpipe
at the corner of the building.

I sat there waiting for
Lieutenant Jacobs to return, really just wanting to get out of
there. The sun beat down on me and I began to perspire. I shifted
to the other end of the bench to be in the shade and noticed red on
my new sneakers. Darn! I saw that I had left little red footprints
like ink from a rubber stamp marching down the sidewalk. I had just
taken the new sneakers out of the box this morning. I wondered what
it would take to get the blood off the shoe. Probably more than
Tide.

When the county coroner
arrived, he pompously traipsed up the sidewalk to the building
while his old black bag bumped against his leg. At the last
election, the coroner-slash-dentist had run uncontested. After his
reelection, people had joked that only his family had voted for
him. Everyone swore they had left that choice blank. Mickey Mouse
got two write-in votes.

Amongst all the activity
going on, Trudy shuffled out of the exhibit hall and sat down next
to me.

“The dead guy is Wes, the
trumpet player in my husband Ray’s band,” she whispered to me. “I
identified him.”

“Oh my God!” Then I
whispered to Trudy, “That’s the guy Sister Bernadine had the fight
with yesterday.”

“That’s right. I heard your
friend telling you about it. He only recently started to play in
Ray’s band. I only knew him from his reputation. Ach, Gott in
himmel, I need to call Ray. I think Wes was a bit of a scoundrel. I
know he was in a lot of trouble when he was a kid. But he didn’t
deserve to die. Oh, this is terrible for the band.”

Frank Metzger, leaning
against a sturdy oak tree next to the park bench took the toothpick
out of his mouth. “Ain’t going to be too good for Polka Daze
either. Ya know we started this event to help our kids learn about
their ancestry. Now it’s turned into a major tourist event and
brings a lot of money into Hermann. This could hurt
attendance.”

I handed Trudy a tissue to
wipe her eyes. “It’ll be okay, you guys. Lieutenant Jacobs is a
good cop. He’ll find out who did this.”

The two detectives finally
came out of the building and walked over to Trudy and me. Detective
Decker took out a small notebook and said, “Ladies, I need you to
give me the names of people who knew the deceased.”

“Well, let’s see,” Trudy
answered. “Besides my husband, Ray, there’s the other guys in the
band. Clara Schmidt, our drummer and her husband, Vic. He plays the
clarinet. Then there’s Bobby Reinhart. He plays the
euphonium.”

“What the heck is that?”
asked Detective Decker.

“A euphonium? It’s a small
tuba. Don’t know much about music, do ya?” Trudy shot
back.

Detective Decker sat down
next to Trudy. As she mentioned names, he jotted them down in his
pocket-sized notebook.

I sat there trying to look
nonchalant. After all, I didn’t actually see anything. What other
people had told me didn’t count. Isn’t that hearsay? If I didn’t
say anything then I wouldn’t be lying. But Jacobs was too smart to
let me get away with that.

“What do you know about
this, Ms. Penny?”

“Nothing. I never saw that
man before I almost fell over him. And please call me
Jennifer.”

“Okay, Jennifer, talk to
me. I heard a friend of yours had a fight with this guy
yesterday.”

Where the heck had he heard
that? He just got here. I looked at Trudy and she looked away, her
neck and face turning pink, then red.

Standing, I touched my
index finger to my lips, looking around as if to be thinking. “You
must mean Sister Bernadine. I heard she had a little tiff with this
Wes guy yesterday, but it was nothing.”

“Where can I find
her?”

When Jacobs stared at me
with eyes as dark as, I caved. Still trying to keep from telling
him anything I said, “Gee, she could be anywhere. She works at the
church and she volunteers at the battered women’s shelter. She has
a sister in Mankato somewhere. I don’t really know.” I smiled up at
him through my bangs, trying to look innocent.

“Jennifer, give me her
phone number. Stop being difficult.”

“Okay, but please let me
call her.” I didn’t want a cop to break the news to her. I opened
my cell phone and pressed her speed dial number. When the call went
to voice mail I said, “Bernie, you need to come over to the
fairgrounds. There’s a problem at the Home Arts building. Come over
as soon as possible. It’s important.” I hung up.

“She didn’t have anything
to do with this, you know.” I gave Jacobs one of my sweetest
smiles. He snorted and shook his head. He pointed to the park
bench. “Sit.”

As I sat down I noticed
Detective Decker with Trudy, talking to the musicians in Trudy’s
husband’s band. I hoped Decker hadn’t seen my dewy rear. I wondered
if I could sit here until he left. Fat chance of that.

Turning my head, I looked
up at Lieutenant Jacobs and said. “I gave Sister Bernadine a ride
home last night so she wasn’t even around here. Besides she’d never
do anything to hurt another person. For heaven’s sake, she’s a
nun!”

“Did you two come here
together last night?” He asked, sitting next to me.

“No, I ran into her after I
left my coffee booth.”

“Why did you need to give
her a ride? How did she get here to begin with?”

Darn, I thought, this is
one smart man. He handed me a sweaty bottle of water. I rolled it
across my forehead and then twisted off the cap and took a long
pull from the much-appreciated water.

“Okay, Jennifer, tell me
everything. Let’s start at the beginning. What happened here
yesterday?”

I took a deep breath and
began to tell him about yesterday’s events.

3

Thursday

When Natalie Younger had
strolled into the Home Arts Building with her little white clutch
purse tucked under her arm, my first thought was to hide under the
table. The woman drove me nuts. The fastest phone in the Midwest,
she never heard a piece of gossip she didn’t hurry to pass
on.

My coffee booth at the
Polka Daze Festival sat in the prime location, across from the wide
double doors. Most people, like Natalie, turned right and circled
the perimeter. They checked out the crafts and merchandise for sale
and then ended up at my booth near the end of the
circuit.

Today you could buy
handmade earrings, hand-blown glass figurines, and hand-painted and
shellacked little wooden boxes. A crowd of on-lookers stood in
front of a booth watching as a lady demonstrated how to make tiny
dumplings called spaetzle.

A plump lady making lace in
the booth next to mine called over to me. “Did you lose something,
dear? Why is your head under the table?”

I straightened up while
running my hand through my short chestnut hair. When ruffled, it
tends to stand up on end. My friends say it makes me look like a
frightened porcupine.

In the spirit of Hermann,
Minnesota’s annual Polka Daze, the woman wore a blue and white
dirndl, the traditional German dress. She looked ready to grab a
bucket and milk a cow.

In contrast to my red “Kiss
Me I’m German” t-shirt, her crisp cotton print dress flowed all the
way to the floor with a white lace-edged bib hugging her ample
bosom. Her hands zipped along, as she flipped wooden bobbins
wrapped with white thread, making lace, her head nodding while I
explained.

The front table of her
booth was a cascade of lace. Doilies, table runners, lacy collars,
baby dresses, shawls and wraps, even a tablecloth and a bedspread,
all lacy and made of crochet thread, pearl cotton thread and
fingerling yarn in a rainbow of colors.

I kept an eye on Natalie’s
progress toward my booth. “I’m hiding from a lady I just saw. She’s
a terrible gossip and I know if she stops at my booth, she’ll talk
my ear off.”

“Oh, I see. You’re against
gossip. Is it a religious thing?”

“Heavens, no! I love
gossip. I mean, you know, I like to know what’s going on. Isn’t
that shameful? But, Natalie’s so negative. She never talks about
the good things that happen to people. It’s depressing to listen to
her for more than a few minutes, but Lord forgive me—I'm easily
sucked into a conversation with her. When my marriage went to the
dogs, she blathered to everybody in Hermann that I was a terrible
wife.”

Behind her booth a sign on
the wall proclaimed “Trudy’s Lace Haus, Itzig, MN.” I hadn’t been
to the tiny town of Itzig in twenty years. “Is Itzig still the
smallest town around here?”

“Ach, yah. Two hundred
twelve people. If we were in Europe it would probably be called a
hamlet. But we’re only eight miles west of Hermann, so we shop
here. We think of Hermann as ‘the big city,’” she
laughed.