Fifty is the New F-Word

by Margaret Lashley

  “What?”

  Tom blew out a breath. “Val, they found a body. And it fits Cold Cuts’ description.”

  THE COLD WAR BETWEEN Tom and me continued all the way across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to the Sarasota County line. Finally, I couldn’t take the silence any longer.

  “Tom, the reason I went out –”

  “Val, I don’t want to hear it right now,” Tom barked. His eyes never wavered from the road ahead. “All I asked you to do was take it easy for a couple of hours. But no. That was too much to ask.”

  “Tom –”

  “I said I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Well you’re going to!” I screeched. “I got a text from Cold Cuts!”

  Tom nearly wrecked the SUV. “Why didn’t you tell –”

  “I tried!”

  Tom glanced my way, his cold expression melting slightly. “Okay, okay. What did she say?”

  “Having a blast with Bill.”

  “What? So...so she’s all right?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know. There was a picture with the text. Of Cold Cuts. With her throat slit.”

  “What?”

  “But it wasn’t real,” I added quickly. “I mean, it was taken on Halloween or something. The guy at the morgue said she was alive. At least in that picture, anyway.”

  “The guy at the...?” Tom began. Then shook his head. “Never mind. Why would she do that?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. Was it a joke by Cold Cuts? If so, why wouldn’t she just say so? The only thing that makes sense...Tom, what if it was some kind of sick threat from that psycho fisherman?”

  Tom bit his lip. “You tried calling her back?”

  “No. I wanted to wait...and talk to you first.”

  “Oh.” What remained of Tom’s anger evaporated in the seriousness of the moment. He reached over and squeezed my hand.

  “Should I call her, Tom? What if the psycho picks up?”

  “No. Wait. We’ll do it when we get to Sarasota. A few more minutes won’t matter.”

  “Okay. Look, I’m sorry if –”

  “It’s okay, Val. Given the circumstances, I would have done the same thing.”

  A sigh of relief escaped my tight lungs. I gave Tom’s hand a squeeze and sniffed back a tear. “Did you have any luck with the license plates?”

  “Not sure yet. Most checked out. But there were a couple of odd ones worth following up on.” Tom turned off the highway and stopped at a light. He looked at me, his face dead serious. “Val, when we get there, we’ll need to give Detective Stanley everything we’ve got. It’s his case to work, whether we like it or not. Being charged with obstruction of justice would not be good for you. And it wouldn’t help my career, either.”

  “Okay. You have my word.”

  A couple of blocks later, Tom pulled into the parking lot of the Sarasota Police Station. “You ready?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He took my phone, punched speed dial for Cold Cuts and put it on speaker. We sat in the cab of his SUV and listened to the phone ring. It rang and rang and rang. Finally, Tom clicked the phone off and handed it back to me.

  “At this point, maybe no news is good news,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  But neither one of us believed it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Whatever they tell you, try to act surprised, even if you know it already,” Tom said as he helped me hobble across the parking lot toward the main entrance of the Sarasota Police Station. “At this point, Stanley may try to shock you into a confession. You’re not supposed to know about the body part being sea pork – or the blood in the bathroom being chemicals.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

  Tom kissed me, gave me a hug and opened the door. As soon as I set foot in the place, we were pounced on by an angry, red-faced Detective James Stanley.

  “I’m glad to see you can follow some orders,” he hissed at Tom. “This way, Ms. Fremden.” He grabbed my arm with his sausage fingers and tugged me toward the interrogation room. I locked eyes with Tom for one last second. The helplessness that had begun to snarl my mind fell away. Tom’s eyes glowed with the subtle strength of knowing that, no matter what anyone else thought, we were in the right.

  I SHIFTED MY BUTT ON the chair and wondered for a second why they called it a ‘hot seat.’ The interrogation room was freezing, and the hard, metal chair I sat in was as cold and sticky as a dirty frog’s bottom.

  “This is not looking good for you, Ms. Fremden,” Detective Stanley sneered. He chortled mildly, causing the blubbery folds that hung like meat curtains between his chin and chest to wobble grotesquely. “As you know, Ms. Piddle has been missing three days now.”

  “It’s Piddleton,” I said, trying to be helpful. “And she’s probably been missing for four days.”

  I guess Detective Stanley didn’t like being helped.

  “I said Piddleton,” he barked in my face. “And today is Wednesday. She’s been missing since Monday. That’s three days, according to my basic math calculations.”

  “Yes sir,” I backtracked, for Tom’s sake. “What I meant was, I’m beginning to think that it wasn’t Cold – Ms. Piddleton in the bed next to mine that Monday morning.”

  Detective Stanley’s brow furrowed below his dead-squirrel toupee. “Why would you think that?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  He looked at me sourly. “I’d rather you did.”

  “Well...the person in the bed was snoring. My friend Goober told me she doesn’t snore.”

  The detective’s face grew as dull as wax. “Goober?”

  “Uh...his real name is Gerald...something or other.”

  “You know, your disrespect for me and this investigation is getting pretty tiresome, Ms. Fremden. Maybe this will get you to take it more seriously.”

  Detective Stanley pulled a photo from a folder. He slid the picture across the table toward me. It was the face of a dead woman, her mouth open, dull eyes staring blankly. “She was found yesterday.”

  “That’s not Cold Cuts. I mean, Ms. Piddleton. That’s Ruby,” I said, recognizing the nose piercing Darren had described.

  Detective Stanley’s cruel smile came unglued and fell off his face. “You killed her, too?”

  “What? No! I heard about her...at the morgue. In St. Petersburg.”

  “And tell me, what were you doing at the morgue?”

  “I was checking to see if, you know, Ms. Piddleton was there.”

  “That, Ms. Fremden, is a very odd thing for a person to do.”

  “I know it looks weird. But this morning, I got a text message from her and –”

  “And you didn’t think to tell us?” Detective Stanley bellowed. His fist hit the table with a thud that reverberated around the small, concrete box of a room.

  “I’m telling you now, if you’ll let me!”

  The detective bit his fat lip and took a deep breath. “All right. Continue. What did the message say?”

  “‘Having a blast with Bill.’ But it came with a picture of Cold Cuts with her throat slit. I didn’t want to believe it. I was in shock. So I took it to my friend at the morgue.”

  “Of course,” he said sourly. “Everyone has a friend at the morgue nowadays.”

  “Look, just for the record, Darren said it was an old photo. From Halloween. So I didn’t think –”

  “That’s just it, Fremden,” Detective Stanley said, his condescending tone rising again. “You didn’t think. Give me your phone.”

  I handed it over. “‘Having a blast with Bill,’” he mumbled aloud. He stared at the picture. “Tell me, how long have you known Bill Robo?” His eyes shifted quickly from the phone to my face.

  “I’d never seen him before I took that yoga class at the resort.”

  “And your friend Cold – Ms. Pid – oh, hell! Cold Cuts. How long has she known Robo?”

  “The same.”

&nb
sp; “She just met him as well. Tell me. Do you think she would have voluntarily gone off with him?”

  “I...I don’t know. Maybe. They were...um...intimate. When we got caught in a storm on Dog Island.”

  Detective Stanley’s face reddened. “And you didn’t think this was relevant information?”

  “He seemed like a nice guy....”

  “The guy could be a murderer, for all you know!” Detective Stanley barked.

  I flinched. “I know, now. But at the time...he didn’t seem like the type to....” I looked for reassurance in the detective’s eyes. I didn’t get it.

  He pursed his lips and spat his next words. “Nobody ever seems like the type, Ms. Fremden. Until they are. You saw the blood all over the place.”

  “But it wasn’t blood!”

  The detective’s angry eyes shifted with surprise. “How would you know that?”

  “I...I don’t! I just meant, I hope it’s not blood. I want my friend to be alive, Detective Stanley. I love her!”

  “Love, huh?” the detective sneered. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it. I see, now. This is this some kind of love triangle gone bad, isn’t it? The desk clerk seemed to think you and your friend were quite chummy. On holiday together in the honeymoon suite. Then this Bill Robo character comes in and screws everything up. Well, now. That just wouldn’t do. So you took care of the both of them!”

  He pounded his fist on the table so hard I nearly fell out of my chair.

  “No!” I cried out, more angry than afraid. “That’s not what happened. Me and Cold Cuts...it was all a joke. A misunderstanding we took it too far. I was supposed to be there with my boyfriend, Tom. He couldn’t make it the first day –”

  “How convenient,” Detective Stanley snarled. “Listen, I’ll come clean with you if you come clean with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That body part that washed up on the beach? It turned out to be sea chops.”

  “Sea pork,” I began, but the surprise and suspicion on the detective’s face reminded me I wasn’t supposed to know. “I...uh...sea pork chops? You say?”

  “Not pork chops. Sea chops. It’s some kind a bull crap that lives on the reefs. Anyway, all that blood in the bathroom. Turns out it’s chemicals. Bleach and ammonia. Could have been used for cleanup.” Detective Stanley paused and waited for my reaction.

  “You don’t say,” I offered.

  “Then there’s the pliers and the tooth. Open your mouth, Ms. Fremden.”

  I started to object, then gave in and did as instructed.

  “Wider. So I can see your molars.”

  I opened wider.

  “I see you’ve got all of yours. How convenient.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not illegal to pull your own tooth in these United States. But practicing dentistry without a license is.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “That leaves the blood trail from the cottage to the beach.”

  “But I thought it was fish...fishy, Detective.” Oh crap! “Back to the tooth. I mean...why would someone pull their tooth...on vacation at the beach? If you could afford that fancy resort, you could afford a dentist, right?”

  “You’ve obviously have never needed a root canal, Ms. Fremden.”

  “No,” I admitted.

  Detective Stanley blew out a breath. “The facts still remain. Your so-called friend is missing, along with Bill Robo. No one’s heard a word from either of them.”

  “But what about the text message I showed you?”

  Detective Stanley’s overblown confidence missed a beat. “I meant until now. Besides, we don’t know if she sent it. It could have come from whoever knows where she is, and what’s happened to her. It could have come from you.”

  “But...but I couldn’t have sent this message to myself!”

  “Sure you could have,” Detective Stanley sneered. “Easy. You just used her phone after you did her in.”

  “HOW’D IT GO?” TOM ASKED as he climbed out of his SUV. He’d waited for me outside the station, and stayed in his vehicle to avoid rubbing any more cop elbows the wrong way.

  “The body turned out to be Ruby instead of Cold Cuts, so Detective Stanley was forced to let me go,” I explained as Tom helped me crawl into the passenger seat. “But he’d made it crystal clear I wasn’t off the hook.”

  “I bet he did.”

  “At least I got my purse back,” I said, and grabbed the cane from Tom. “You know, Detective Stanley told me not to leave my residence or he’d have me arrested. Can he do that?”

  “Not really,” Tom said, as he scooted onto the driver’s seat and shut his door. He turned the ignition on the silver 4Runner. “It’s an old cop trick. But some people still fall for it.”

  I scowled. “He told me to stop playing Miss Marple and let him do his job.”

  Tom smiled wryly. “I’ve told you the same thing. Not that it’s done any good.”

  “This morning, you said you didn’t have a chance to talk to Monty, the desk clerk at the resort.”

  “Right.” Tom reversed and pulled out of the parking spot.

  “Well, we’re here in Sarasota. We might as well stop by and give it a go.”

  Tom hit the brakes. “Have you not heard a word I’ve said, Val? I can’t get involved anymore. I told you that.”

  “Okay, okay!” I snapped. “But I need to stop by there anyway.”

  Tom shifted into forward. “What for?”

  “I want to see if they still have my gold thong bikini.”

  He laughed bitterly and hit the gas. “Sure you do.”

  “Tom, I think Monty has it out for me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I can just feel it. You know. That gut reaction you’re always talking about. I just know it.”

  “Val, there’s no way you’re talking me into taking you to see Monty.”

  “But –”

  “Not for all the buts in Birmingham.”

  “Then what are you going to do now?”

  “I’m taking you home, then I’m going back to work. There’s no point wasting a whole week’s vacation spinning our wheels like this.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tom dropped me off at my house, but not before making sure my next-door neighbor Laverne was home to keep an eye on me. I was angry at Tom for giving up on the case. I was in no mood for company – much less a dose of Laverne’s silly optimism.

  No sooner had Tom’s SUV disappeared out the driveway when the doorbell rang. I was hoping against odds for Finkerman. At least then I could punch someone in the nose. But it was Laverne. I groaned, opened the door, and braced myself for a tidal wave of empty-headed good cheer.

  “Hi, Laverne.”

  “It’s all my fault!” the old woman screeched, and burst into tears.

  “What? Come in here. What are you talking about, Laverne?”

  “It’s my fault, Val, honey. The first time I saw it, I had a bad feeling. I knew it and I didn’t warn you!”

  “Warn me about what?”

  “The curse of Vendaygo!” Laverne sobbed, and grabbed a hold of me like a starving leech.

  She wept on my shoulder until her mascara streamed in twin black torrents down the front of my shirt. I always knew Laverne was loopy, but a curse? She’d just flown up the crazy-old-lady scale to a whole new level. My father Justas had a saying for folks who believed in voodoo and curses. “Their cornbread ain’t done in the middle.”

  “Have a seat,” I said, and peeled Laverne off me. “Let me get you something to drink, then I want you to tell me all about this curse thing.”

  I hobbled to the kitchen as Laverne flopped into my easy chair. “Vendaygo,” Laverne sniffed. “The curse of Vendaygo, Val. I gave it to you!”

  Laverne burst into tears again. I was going to fix her a glass of tea, but switched to gin and tonic instead. “Curse? Come on, Laverne. You don’t really believe that, do you?”

&nbs
p; “I never did...until it happened to me.”

  “What are you talking about?” I handed her a drink and sat down on the couch. She took a big gulp of booze and spilled her story like a crook hanging by the ankle out a thirty-story window.

  “When I was working as a cabaret dancer at the Flamingo, this guy Vinnie Vendaygo was sweet on me. But I wasn’t too keen on him.” She looked over at me.

  “Okay.”

  “Well, my best friend Donna told me to give him a chance. I already knew deep down in my heart that Vinnie wasn’t right guy for me, but I let him think he was. He took me to the movies and dinner, and some fancy shows. We were having a good time until one night, he up and surprised me with a ring. He said it wasn’t an engagement ring, just something to let the world know I was his girl.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  Laverne stared at me for a moment with her melted raccoon eyes. “Nothing. On his part. But for me, it all felt like a big, ugly lie. I shouldn’t have taken the ring, Val. But I did. I wore it home that night feeling like a fraud. I couldn’t sleep. I made my mind up I’d give it back to him the next day, but he went and got run over by a bus before I had the chance!” Laverne shook her head in sorrow. “I should have realized it then. But I didn’t. It took me way too long to put two and two together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ring was cursed, Val. From then on out, every time I wore it, something awful would happen. I’d get let go from my job. I’d rip a pair of stockings. I’d lose my keys to my apartment. Horrible things like that!”

  “They don’t seem out of the –”

  “So I stopped wearing it and shoved it in a drawer!” Laverne lamented. “I hadn’t thought about that ring for years. Then last year, I found it in a drawer. I tell you Val, it was like finding a rattlesnake curled up and ready to strike!”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got out my oven mitts, picked it up and threw it in the trash.”

  “So, the curse is over, Laverne. How could you give it to me?”

  “Remember when you came back from your mom’s all sick, and I made you that soup?”