by C.L. Bevill
Chapter Four
Bubba Makes a List
Monday
There’s nothing in the world like the sweet, wondrous smell of freedom, Bubba Snoddy thought as he walked out of the Pegram County Jail.
Bubba had been in excellent company while he was temporarily incarcerated. Certainly, he hadn’t been bored. What seemed like half the town had stopped in to chat or just to take a gander at Bubba Snoddy, the infamous Bluebeard of Pegramville, suspected murderer of no less than a dozen young virgins, until Tee Gearheart had explained to them that Bubba was only being held for questioning. Not only that, but there had only been one dead woman involved, and she surely had not been decapitated on the night of the full moon in the Sturgis Woods.
Newt Durley stayed until Saturday night when his sister bailed him out. He had been a hell of a chess player. Furthermore, Bubba had relearned some of his algebra with Mike Holmgreen which had been interesting even if Mike’s grandmother, Mary Jean Holmgreen, had winked lasciviously at Bubba on her way out of the jail after visiting with her grandson.
Bubba had just plain ignored Sheriff John Headrick’s irritating, accusatory glances, as the man wandered into the jail half a dozen times, knowing full and damned well that his prisoner was being held illegally. Each time Bubba had just given the older man a grin and a wave like he was having the time of his life. He wasn’t yet ready to tell his mother to go find an ambulance-chaser. No one had come in to beat him or threaten him if he didn’t confess. And three hours of questioning plus two hours spent at the lie detector test wasn’t much to speak of in the way of a painful stay at the jail.
Tee had showed Bubba The Pegram Herald on Saturday with its headline story about the murdered woman, except in the paper she was still officially unidentified. The headline proclaimed in inch-high type, ‘Murder in Pegramville!’ There weren’t many details, but the paper had tried to make it the second coming of Jesus Christ. On Sunday, the paper still hadn’t identified Melissa Dearman, and Bubba wondered if The Herald’s crack news reporting team, Maude and Roy Chance, were sleeping on the job. After all, they hadn’t even tried to sneak into the jail to interview the main suspect. And they certainly hadn’t cross-examined Miz Demetrice. Bubba knew full well that his mother likened news reporters to denizens from the lowest level of a murky pond and wouldn’t hesitate to pull out her twelve gauge shotgun for mobile target practice if she was so inclined.
Meals were a delight thanks to the Pegram Café with Lurlene Grady providing the service. Although Bubba briefly thought of the beautiful Deputy Gray, first name unknown, and Tee wouldn’t tell him, he was still enamored enough of Lurlene such that her presence was a welcome change to all the gawkers, Sheriff John’s glaring, and Mike’s algebra lessons.
However, when Bubba retrieved his wallet, belt, shoe laces, and the like from Tee and walked outside the jail on Monday morning, he was happy to see the daylight from the other side of the bars. He was more than happy; he was relieved.
Deputy (first name as yet still unknown) Gray even passed him on the way out and Bubba found himself tipping his hat even though he most obviously was not wearing one. He was positive that the black-haired, green-eyed vixen’s lips had twitched in an involuntary smile, if only for the briefest of seconds. He was also positive that she wasn’t wearing a wedding band on her left hand.
Ah, life was good, even if it was only for the moment. Bubba had other fish to fry, other smelly fish that were rotting on a comparative level with the local manure factory on a hot Texas day. Sheriff John had his sharp-sighted eye on Bubba as the prime suspect in the murder of Melissa Dearman, and it didn’t seem as though Perry Mason, in the guise of Raymond Burr, was going to appear and get the real murderer to confess while on the witness stand.
Abruptly, Bubba’s good mood left him. While he was inside and basically helpless, he could forget the dead woman who had once meant so much to him. Now he would be forced to remember he, or face consequences that he was not responsible for.
It was true that Melissa and Bubba had lived together in an apartment for about two months, just about three years before. It was also true that Melissa had ambitions for Bubba that Bubba hadn’t even realized. Put simply, Melissa wanted more. More status. More money. More of some unnamable quantity that spoke of position and power. Specifically, she wanted Bubba to become an officer. He had more than adequate qualifications to apply for Officer Candidate School. He had refused, not once but half a dozen times.
Bubba could understand where Melissa was coming from. She’d grown up poor, so poor that her parents had lived from hand to mouth. The Army had been her only way out of poverty, and once she’d had a taste of being someone who controlled other soldiers at the advanced rank of staff-sergeant, she wanted more. The Army was a great equalizer. Anyone could aspire to rank, if only they’d play the prestigious game of politicking.
On the other hand, Bubba hadn’t grown up dirt poor, but he did understand poverty. In rural Texas, it had been all around him as a child and still was as an adult. Miz Demetrice had wanted Bubba to understand and comprehend what it meant to be poor so that he would better appreciate what he had. The Snoddy’s themselves weren’t much above poverty. The Snoddy Mansion was on the verge of being a rambling wreck and falling in on itself. From a distance it was only a blurred image of what it must have looked like before the War Between the States. Any of their supposed wealth was tied up in one hundred acres of overgrown land, to include ten acres of mosquito-infested swamp land, not to mention dozens of acres with holes dug haphazardly over the landscape like the crater strewn face of the moon. It wasn’t much of a legacy, but Bubba had never minded.
He had told Melissa all of that years ago. The Army had been his own kind of escape away from people talking about other people so often, that it was an avowed fact that half of the ears of the population of Pegram County were burning at any given time. The Army had its own gossip system but one that left alone those who cared to work and do a good job, which was something Bubba enjoyed doing. Hell, he had taken pride in doing so. But he knew once he became an officer all of that would go away, and politics would come into play. Melissa had wanted the politics of being an ‘officer’s wife.’ She had longed for it, and finally she had gotten it but not with Bubba Snoddy.
Instead, she had seduced their commanding officer, Michael Dearman. Right in Bubba’s own bed in their shared apartment. Sergeant Snoddy had returned home from work early. His first sergeant had let everyone go early, and lo and behold, what had Bubba found?
One fiancée in bed. One captain in the self-same bed with the fiancée. Two naked people in bed together. One naked fiancée doing stuff with one naked captain that Bubba thought reserved for himself and his fiancée.
Upon this traumatic scene, Bubba had temporarily lost his mind. A wave of red had roared over his vision, causing him to lose all reason, logic, and everything he held dear to his heart. The next thing he knew, he was holding Captain Dearman’s arm, grasped in one of his huge fists, with the other man shrieking beside him, and Melissa wrapped around his neck, screaming into his ear, “Bubba! Don’t hurt him! Don’t hurt him! Please, Bubba!”
Bubba had been standing there holding the broken arm of his commanding officer with his fiancée on his back, pounding on him with her fists, and had a vision of his own father beating his mother. Elgin Snoddy had been a handsome dickens with the devil’s own temper when he drank, and he drank often. Too often. Bubba had been very young when his father had had his heart attack but he could distinctly remember those times when Miz Demetrice had to cover up her pretty arms and delicate throat, even in the heat of summer. She had to hide what her husband had done to her in his drunken fits of rage, that he always felt so sorry for afterwards. Even at that tender age, Bubba had been ashamed of his own father. It had been at that very moment that Bubba pictured himself in his father’s place, losing his temper so violently that his loved ones would suffer terribly. And he had been ashamed of himself.
“Oh, my God,” Bubba had muttered. “What have I done?” He had let the captain’s arm go, and Michael Dearman dropped to the floor like a buffalo shot with an elephant gun. Melissa had slid off Bubba’s back and wrapped herself protectively around the officer crumpled on the floor. They consoled each other, naked as jay birds but uncaring of that fact.
“Oh, Bubba,” she had said, looking up at him with sad eyes, “we were going to tell you. I swear. This weekend. We’re going to get married. Me and Michael.” She had stroked his head, as the man on the floor struggled to overcome pain and regain a little composure.
“You got your officer then, ‘Lissa?” he had asked numbly. It was the one thing that had popped into his head. It had been the meanest, most cruel thing he thought that he had ever said to another human being. Although it was true, he still regretted the words.
Melissa had stared up at him with her large, blue eyes, eyes so blue they had reminded him of the afternoon skies in spring. Her chest had been heaving with exertion; her honey-colored hair was askew. She hadn’t said anything to him. As a matter of fact, it had been the last time she had said anything to Bubba at all.
Bubba had called an ambulance and the police, in that order. The captain’s arm looked to be broken, and indeed it had been. Bubba had spent a night in the local jail before the military police came to collect him. They called it a general discharge under other conditions than honorable. Before a month had passed, Melissa had received her own general discharge and married Captain Michael Dearman. A spiteful part of Bubba had wondered if it were in order to avoid charges pressed against the officer and Melissa herself. After all, Michael Dearman had been Melissa’s commanding officer, as well as Bubba’s. And Bubba had found the two of them in bed together, obviously fraternizing with each other. On another level, the captain and Melissa had been in as much trouble as he had been.
So Melissa Dearman nee Connor had gotten her officer. There had been a few people, Army buddies, who had written to Bubba once or twice. One had stopped over last year on his way to another post. They had told Bubba that Melissa and the captain seemed to be happy. She had gotten pregnant last year and given birth to a boy. The captain had been promoted to major and went to some battalion on another post taking his family with him, the temporary scandal seemingly not affecting his career ladder. To be certain, Captain Dearman hadn’t been the first to marry an enlisted woman nor would he be the last. Bubba hadn’t heard anything else about them, and he hadn’t cared to hear anymore.
That was, until Melissa had shown up dead almost on his doorstep. She had been using a rental car. Had she flown in from wherever they were stationed now?
What had Melissa wanted with Bubba? Bubba couldn’t imagine that Melissa wanted to declare her rediscovered love for him. She had been too pragmatic for that. She had had her life mapped out for her. Her husband would make major, then lieutenant colonel, and most certainly the rank of colonel. If it were possible he would wear the star of a general. Then he would retire and start as a consultant to a lucrative defense contractor, with the family at home, and her doing officer’s wifely things. Perhaps he might dabble in politics, with his serene, beautiful wife at his side; his two point five children would be on his other side. That had been the world that she had been on her way to. Perhaps she had genuine feelings for Michael Dearman, Bubba didn’t know and didn’t care to know for the last three years. But what in the name of God had ‘Lissa been doing in Pegramville looking for him?
Because as sure as the day was long, Melissa hadn’t known anyone else in this small town, hundreds of miles away from the big cities and perhaps a thousand miles from where she presently lived with her husband and family. Because, as sure as night falls she was here to see him, and him alone. Because as sure as the leaves will fall in autumn, Bubba was the only one who knew Melissa and had the only reason to kill her.
Bubba was the one Sheriff John was looking at with a rapt, disconcerting eye, because Bubba almost certainly could be the only one who had any reason to kill Melissa Dearman.
And Bubba was going to jail on a permanent basis unless he could figure out who had killed Melissa and damned quickly.
Bubba snapped back to the present with a precipitous feeling that left him discombobulated. His path became clear to him. He had to solve the murder, before the Sheriff solved him, solved him right onto death row, waiting for the deadly drip to take him into the next world. It would be a place where he couldn’t do a damned thing about who had really murdered Melissa Dearman.
His first stop was the Pegram Café where Lurlene was working. Bubba needed to use the phone as well as flirt shamelessly with the blonde-haired thing. After a man had spent a time or two in the jail, a pretty, young, encouraging woman was just the trick to make things seem a little more pleasant.
Lurlene dropped a plate of eggs, hash browns, grits, and bacon unceremoniously on the counter when she saw Bubba coming through the door. She threw up her arms and shrieked, “Bubba!” Then she leaped into his arms and kissed him. He was, after all, a big man, and caught her very nicely. “They let you out!” she yelled.
Bubba winced. She had yelled directly in his ear. “Yes, Miss Lurlene, I noticed that.”
“Well, Bubba, what are they going to do?” she asked, still in his arms. She studied him carefully with her warm brown eyes.
Bubba looked around at a crowd of interested faces. He thanked the Lord above that the Pegram Café was a small café with only enough room for twenty people. However, every chair was full at nine in the morning on this particular morning and their attention was focused fully on Bubba. He waded through the crowd, accepting the odd, “Good to see you, Bubba.” “Did they torture you, Bubba? That’s what Miz Demetrice said.” “We knew you dint do it, Bubba.” Finally, he deposited Lurlene back at the counter, where she blushed furiously, picked up the dropped plate of eggs and fixings, and went back to work.
Noey Wheatfall, the cook and owner of the Pegram Café, came out with a white chef’s hat on his head and a white apron wrapped around his torso. He grinned at Bubba, and said, “Hey, Bubba, did you see the paper yesterday?”
Noey was a good-looking man, about ten years older than Bubba. He had dark brown hair cut short, and the eyes to match. He wasn’t as big as Bubba, but he wasn’t a short man either. He was also married with four children, all of whom could be found in the café helping out in the summertime. His wife, Nancy, also was a hard worker. She spent most of her days at the manure factory as a secretary and her evenings helping at the café. Bubba liked Nancy but had never quite taken a liking to her husband. If he had had to put a reason to it, it would have been that Noey always seemed a little too slick, a little too smiley, and a little too eager with the ladies on nights when his wife was off doing something else. But Bubba hadn’t really thought about it before, and the thought only sat with him now because Noey was looking directly at him and asking, “That was some kind of headline, huh?”
“I didn’t see it,” Bubba lied and immediately asked himself why he had lied.
But Noey slapped him on his back blithely and said, “Meal on the house, Bubba. Being innocent is hard work, ain’t it?”
“I already ate, Noey,” Bubba said. “I just came in to see Miss Lurlene and use the payphone.”
“Hell, use the phone in my office,” Noey replied cheerfully. Then his face twisted. “Don’t those folks over at the jail let you make a phone call?” He hesitated. “You should get a cell phone, boy. Just like everyone else.”
Bubba smiled weakly at the other man and followed him into his office. Noey left promptly without saying anything else. He dialed his phone number and waited for Miz Demetrice to answer.
Adelia Cedarbloom answered the phone about twenty rings later. Adelia was his mother’s housekeeper, as well as confidant, as well as general dog’s body. She gave him a cold hello and told him that his mother was talking to their state representative at the town twenty miles down the road. “About you, course,” she an
swered when Bubba asked why. Bubba told her that he had been released from jail and would be home presently if Miz Demetrice deigned to telephone.
“Thank the Lord Almighty!” said Adelia wholeheartedly. “I have heard about what happens to men in places like that. It is a good thing that you are much bigger than most. You know that if you went to prison, as big as you are, you could have yourself a bitch.”
Bubba asked her to repeat herself. He thought that maybe he had something in his ears, because she couldn’t have said what he thought she had said.
“You know, you could run the place because no one would dare mess with you,” Adelia explained patiently. “When a man controls another man, that other man is called a bitch. I heard it on television.”
“Have you been watching those daytime shows again, Miz Adelia?” asked Bubba.
“Of course not. There’s too much trash on that show. I don’t believe they could find so many people who are sleeping with their girlfriend and their girlfriend’s other boyfriend at the same time. They just make that trumpery up.” Adelia’s voice was indignant, but obviously she still watched the show like a dirty little secret in her closet, kind of like the dirty little secrets on the show.
Bubba wasn’t positive but had an idea that the dark-haired, dark-eyed forty-ish woman, who had been with Demetrice for the last twenty years, was a co-conspirator in the infamous, weekly Pegram County Pokerama. The game was getting to be so well known that they moved it to a new and previously unused location each week. The phone at the big Snoddy house rang off the hook the day before the game, so Bubba didn’t dare answer it if he happened to be in the house. But mostly Bubba wouldn’t answer it because Adelia would beat him to it and give him a don’t-you-dare look besides.
It had been true that he had been expecting the police to show up at the Snoddy place but for an altogether different reason than the one which actually had occurred.
Adelia continued to speak on the other end of the telephone, “I’m sure glad you’re coming home. All kinds of trouble makers out here lately.”
Bubba sat down heavily in Noey’s chair. “What do you mean, Miz Adelia?”
“Saturday night Miz Demetrice had to shoot at someone trying to steal something off the front porch. Your mama ain’t so young anymore that she should be getting knocked down from shooting that blasted elephant gun. Her posterior was so bruised she couldn’t sit down most of Sunday. She said that someone was messing around the property last night around midnight, too. Like that be something new around here. Precious was howling up a storm, mind you. Miz Demetrice decided to keep her in the big house last night, and weren’t it a good thing, too.”
Bubba digested this information. “Thank you, Miz Adelia. I’ll be home tonight. I’ll take care of it.”
“You best do so before Miz Demetrice up and kills someone.”
The phone line was buzzing in his ear before Bubba realized that Adelia had hung up. But Bubba was thinking about his mother. Miz Demetrice had a mighty fine temper when she was so thwarted. She could be vexed about certain matters for months. Last year alone she would cross the street rather than walk on the same sidewalk as Susan Teasdale. Susan’s offense was that she wore the exact same hat as Miz Demetrice to the big church social on Easter Sunday. Of course, Susan had known full well that she was wearing the same hat as Miz Demetrice. She had done so specifically to infuriate Miz Demetrice for reasons that dated back three decades. It had been something about Susan dating Elgin Snoddy before Miz Demetrice, and just look who ended up marrying him and becoming the infamous Snoddy matriarch.
Bubba snorted to himself. Susan had gotten the better end of the bargain, but Miz Demetrice sure wouldn’t admit that. Susan had married a Baptist preacher, who had a church on the far side of Pegramville and was doing very well, thank you. But the gist of all of it was that Miz Demetrice held a grudge. Hell, she probably couldn’t even remember why she disliked Susan to begin with.
But back to the point that Bubba had been so laboriously making in his head. If Miz Demetrice’s one and only child had been hurt, and there had been no doubt that Bubba had been hurt badly, she would have held a grudge against Melissa Dearman, no matter why Melissa had come calling past ten PM on a Thursday night.
Bubba could picture it in his mind. Melissa pulls up to the Snoddy house and sees Miz Demetrice there, hurrying to go to her poker game. Melissa introduces herself. Miz Demetrice rushes into the house, finds Elgin Snoddy’s old Army .45, and returns to shoot Melissa in the back. All in the name of revenge upon her only, beloved son.
Bubba snorted again. Then he laughed. Then he laughed harder. Noey even peeped into his office to see just what in the name of God Bubba was laughing at, and had he lost his mind? When Bubba was done laughing, he wiped a tear away from his eye. He had laughed so hard, his eyes had watered and his gut ached.
The truth was that if Miz Demetrice wanted to kill someone then she would have shot them in their face. It was even more likely she would have clubbed them right between the eyes with a baseball bat. Then she would have called the police herself and confessed immediately. The fact of the matter was that when Melissa had driven up to the Snoddy place Miz Demetrice had been long gone and at her floating poker party already taking someone’s social security money from them with an evil smile.
It wouldn’t be hard to verify. Probably ten women could attest to when Miz Demetrice arrived and ten more to when she left. As soon as he verified that fact, Bubba would make a list of suspects. Who had access to the grounds? Who had motive to kill Melissa? Who had a gun? Who would want Bubba framed for a murder?
~ ~ ~
