Petty Crimes & Head Cases

by Lola Beatlebrox

  “You don’t need my address,” she said. “I don’t want any junk mail.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “Junk mail is so annoying. I don’t send my clients junk mail and I never sell their personal information.”

  She still declined to give me her address or telephone number.

  I led her to my workroom where I draped her in olive green. The color choice felt a little drab and I questioned myself. Why choose a color that made her look sicker? I took her to the sink. That’s when I smelled the odor of cat pee. I sprayed her hair, shampooed with a Caribbean floral product, and hoped the fragrance of frangipani would do the trick. It didn’t.

  She still smelled like cat pee. It was coming from her clothes. Face sores, tired hair, pasty face, ammonia odor. And why won’t she give her address? Could she be cooking meth?

  I applied a deep conditioner, rinsed, towel dried her hair, and led her back to my styling chair, then began to clip away.

  “Such a lot of roadwork we’re having right now,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. The sound of my scissors filled the silence.

  “Is there as much going on in your neighborhood as there is in mine?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re tearing up the street in front of my house,” I said. “The information superhighway—Google Fiber.”

  “We haven’t got it yet.”

  So she doesn’t live in the condos, the apartments, Blue Cliffs, or any neighborhood within two miles of downtown.

  I pressed on. “My son Jamie says he’s enjoying school. He goes to Sunshine Elementary. Do your kids go there too?”

  “No, Four Corners.”

  “I always thought that was a good school too.”

  “He likes it okay,” she said.

  Four Corners Elementary, one son, no high speed internet—that narrows it down.

  I shaped her head as I continued to shape her conversation. “We’re working so hard on our home this year. New siding and now the chimney’s falling down. I almost think it’s better to rent than to buy, don’t you?”

  “I’ve never owned a home.”

  A renter.

  “But you like cats, don’t you? I like them too. You’re lucky your landlord allows cats.”

  “We don’t have any cats.”

  Then why that smell? “You’re done,” I said. “Would you like to see the back?”

  She picked up the mirror, looked briefly at the back of her head, and nodded.

  “Blow dry?”

  “Sure.”

  The cat smell blew around the salon. I couldn’t wait to get her out the door.

  “What do I owe you?” she asked, when I turned the blow dryer off.

  “Thirty-five.”

  She took two twenties out of her purse. Then she shuffled out the front door.

  I put the bills to my nose.

  Cat pee.

  I washed them in the sink, but they still smelled.

  It was time to talk to Carl.

  Carl and I met in our cars behind the Dairy Queen in the driver’s-window-to-driver’s window position you see cop cars assume with their tail pipes steaming. I always wondered what cops talk about, all cozied up like that, until Carl told me they just shoot the shit. That made me feel better about listening to gossip all day.

  “I think I’ve found a meth lab,” I said.

  Carl’s jaw hit the top of his collar, but he was ready to listen. Ever since I saved Orchid’s life, he’s paid attention. “What makes you say that?”

  “I learned a thing or two about meth cooking from a client who owns a duplex. She rented her place to a meth addict, although she didn’t know it at the time. She told me meth labs use toxic chemicals like ammonia. It makes the place smell like a litter box.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Carl said. “You visited someone’s house and it smells like a litter box so you think it’s a meth lab.”

  “No, no. Someone visited me who smells like a litter box. Cooking meth gives off noxious gasses. She reeked of it.”

  “You think this woman is living in a house with a meth lab? I’d rather live in a nuclear reactor.”

  “She looks awful, Carl. Skin practically green, hair lifeless, face gaunt, open sores. She smells like cat pee but has no cats!”

  “This is a little sketchy, Tracy.”

  “But it all fits,” I said. “The missing mail, the identity theft. She needs cash to buy supplies. She’s desperate because she’s hooked just like that meth head you caught chasing his car in Summit Park.”

  “I don’t know, darling. This could be another one of your wild ones.”

  “She has a kid, Carl,” I said, my face screwed up with concern. “He goes to Four Corners Elementary. Think of the kid.”

  Carl rubbed his hands, then looked at me through the car window with a solemn expression. “The Four Corners neighborhood, huh?”

  “Yeah, how big could that be? Just a few roads. We could cruise it right now.”

  “Nah uh,” he said. “I’m on duty—that’s not my beat.”

  “What’s happening on Main Street? Nothing. What’s happening in Four Corners? Plenty. Let’s go.”

  He sighed. “We’ll take your car. I’ll meet you in the Gauntlet.”

  I followed him to a stretch of road everyone calls the Gauntlet. It’s a straightaway leading out of town where motorists always accelerate over the speed limit. More drunk drivers had been caught here than any other piece of highway in our state. If you “Run the Gauntlet” after having a couple, watch out—even slowpokes get pulled over.

  Carl parked his car with its nose pointed out, looking ready to pounce. I pulled up and he hopped in.

  Four Corners is the most rural part of our county. The roads snake their way over sagebrush hills. Herds of cattle, dairy cows, sheep, and horses dot the landscape. Houses are few and far between and they’re down long dirt driveways and can’t be seen from the street.

  After we passed the sign for the Rainbow Cemetery, we topped a little rise and saw a farmhouse in the distance. It was a beautiful spread with an orchard, a cornfield, and a big barn. Holsteins nuzzled the green grass by the river.

  “That’s Cody Manson’s place,” Carl said. “He’s a polygamist.”

  Just as he said this, three women emerged from the barn wearing aprons followed by a herd of small children.

  “Why aren’t those kids in school?” I asked.

  “Home schooled,” Carl said.

  We traveled further and turned onto a road where the homes were only half a mile apart. Mailboxes and trash cans punctuated the shoulder.

  “This is a lot harder than I thought it would be,” I said.

  “Did you think the cooker’s home was going to jump out and bite you?”

  I laughed.

  “People have a unique way of life out here,” Carl said. “They raise big families and take care of their own. No one pokes into the lives of their neighbors and they go to church on Sundays. One thing we have in our favor, though, is trash collection.”

  I looked at him.

  “Watch out!” he shouted.

  A chicken was crossing the road. I swerved to avoid it and Carl gripped his armrest. “Tracy, let’s trade places.”

  I pulled over and he took the wheel. Carl’s mouth was a turned-down line.

  “What’s this about trash collection?” I asked, when he appeared to be calmer.

  “Technically, anything you put in the trash on the street is considered abandoned. Anyone can root through your trash and it’s not considered stealing.”

  I pondered this fact. Every homeless person in the big valley must know this. That’s how they get food to eat and clothing to wear.

  “In a meth lab situation, we’ll contact the refuse company and arrange for them to collect all the suspect’s trash with one of their trucks. Then we’ll examine the trash in the back parking lot at the police station.”

  “What will you be looking for
?”

  “The ingredients for making meth—Sudafed bubble packs, caustic household items, paint thinner, acetone, drain cleaner.”

  A light bulb went on. “Mrs. Oscar was complaining the other day that all she seems to get in her trash bins lately is empty containers of stuff like that. And people are leaving batteries with the lithium removed at the recycling center.”

  Carl thought about this for a minute. “The recycling center just installed a surveillance camera, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not hooked up to anything—it’s a dummy.”

  “Too bad.”

  “But Mrs. Oscar has a surveillance system,” I said. “I’ll bet she stores all her videos in the Cloud.”

  “If we could get footage of your client leaving trash at Mrs. Oscar’s gas station, that would be hard evidence.”

  “Then you think this is a real case?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I’ve got a nose for crime,” I said.

  He winked. “You smelled cat piss.”

  “Well, what about that? An ammonia smell is a real clue, wouldn’t you say? If she smells like that, the kid does too. Someone at school must have noticed it.”

  Carl nodded.

  “Get the youth officer on it?”

  “I’ll get the youth officer on it,” Carl said.

  “And the trash officer?”’

  “And the trash officer—that would be me.”

  “And the narcotics unit?”

  “And the narcotics unit.”

  “Surely the chief will give you the detective position if you find a meth lab.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  I heard the disgust in his voice. The chief hadn’t made a decision about the detective job. When he assigned the cat in the suitcase to Carl, the chief thought there was nothing to it, but that suitcase contained one of the biggest human interest crimes in the history of the department. Paddy Hamburger’s stories made mincemeat out of the chief and praised Carl.

  That’s what’s behind it—jealousy. Hell hath no fury like a police chief scorned.

  “You’ve got to tread lightly with this one, don’t you?” I said.

  Carl sighed. “Yeah. Gotta make the chief look good.”

  “How can we do that?”

  “Sic Mrs. Oscar on him,” he said to me. “Then he’ll ask me to look into the trash disposal problem and I’ll turn everything I find out over to him.”

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  We ran the Gauntlet again and pulled up to Carl’s patrol car. He got out and I slipped into the driver’s seat. I drove straight to Mrs. Oscar’s gas station where, as predicted, she had plenty to say.

  The next day the chief asked Carl and Joe to get the “gas lady” off his back and find out who was dumping trash in her— he used a descriptive word.

  When Carl arrived at the gas station, Mrs. Oscar called him a “dear boy” and gave him a huge box of empty household cleaning containers and an equally huge box of VHS tapes.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “She needs a new surveillance system,” Carl said.

  The police department had no way to view VHS tapes, so Carl rooted through our attic and brought down the VHS player he had in grade school.

  I made popcorn.

  We spent the evening in bed watching Mrs. Oscar’s videos. The tapes were dark and grainy. At times they were full of static. Shapes shifted across the screen looking like ghosts pumping God knows what into heavenly transports of shimmering metal. Humanoid shapes threw things into dimly lit holes.

  “This is hella boring,” I said in my best Valley Girl imitation.

  Carl pulled a videocassette out of his old college knapsack. “Put this in.”

  It was Deep Throat. The rest of our evening was much more interesting.

  For his part of the investigation, Joe sidestepped the youth officer and talked to Tina White Horse.

  “She knows every teacher at Four Corners Elementary,” Torgesen said, during my weekly dinner for nutrition-depleted police force bachelors.

  “She’s very attractive,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  Joe Torgesen, you did not overlook that fact.

  “Was she any help?” Carl asked.

  “She gave me the name of a little boy at Four Corners Elementary who smells like a litter box. And I have his address.”

  “Dude,” said Carl.

  Torgesen laughed.

  Jamie chimed in. “A cat litter box? Pew!”

  “Does anybody in your school smell like cat pee?” I asked.

  “No,” Jamie said, “but I know somebody who smells like a guinea pig.”

  “Who?” Carl asked.

  “Mrs. Woodhouse, the science teacher. Her whole room smells like a guinea pig. She has one in a cage. Sometimes I get to feed it.”

  “What does it eat?”

  “Carrots and celery.”

  After dinner, Carl and Joe disappeared into Carl’s office while I helped Jamie with his homework. He was learning to multiply two 2-digit numbers together with a technique called “partial products.”

  Why couldn’t he just learn math the way I did?

  The partial products technique required tens and ones and multiplication and addition laid out in an “area chart” and the patience of Job.

  “Let me show you how I learned,” I said, picking up a pencil and stacking the two-digit numbers on top of each other. “Nine times six is sixty-three and carry the six,” I said. “You see? This is much easier, Jamie.”

  Jamie did it his way. After a few minutes, he said, “Mommy, why did we get different answers?”

  I eyeballed his area chart with its perfect math. Then I studied my math.

  Oops. “I made a little mistake,” I said, erasing the six and the three so vigorously I put a hole in the paper. “Of course, nine times six is fifty-four.” So much for 20th century math.

  After Jamie was tucked in, I went back to the kitchen where I sprayed a blackened pot with oven cleaner.

  Carl and Joe joined me. “Are you cooking meth in here?”

  “Very funny,” I said to Carl, trying not to breathe the fumes.

  “Why don’t you join us in the den,” he said.

  I wiped my hands on a dish cloth, and headed for the desk where Joe and Carl were hunched over the computer.

  “We’re running the little boy’s father through the system,” Carl said. “No record, not even a speeding ticket.”

  “His mother’s clean too,” Joe said. “They have a webpage designing service which they run out of their home. It’s under the husband’s name—Mary Owens is the mother’s maiden name.”

  I settled on the sofa. “Are they really married?”

  “Couldn’t find a record,” Carl said.

  Joe shrugged his shoulders. “Just a regular middle class family with student loans, credit card debt, and no home ownership.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Arkansas,” said Carl. “There’s no indication of why they came here.”

  “I’ll do some more digging on Monday when Carl starts riding the garbage truck,” Joe said.

  “What fun,” I said.

  Over the next two weeks, Carl accompanied the trash men on their route through Four Corners and sifted through the neighborhood garbage in the back of the police station. He came across plenty of empty household cleaner containers, but nothing in huge concentrations and nothing from the suspects’ address.

  The narcotics division put the house on 24-hour surveillance, but the area was so deserted the stakeout was obvious. In fact, my wan, listless, sore-infested customer—Mary Owens—called the police about “the strange car outside her house.”

  So much for undercover work.

  The case limped along until Carl came home one evening with a little job for me.

  “I won’t do it!”

  “It’s just a phone call,” he said. “All you have to do is pretend you’re Hazel Bigby.”
r />   “No one can impersonate Hazel Bigby. She whines like a mosquito.”

  Hazel Bigby ran the Good Landlord Program for the mayor. She nagged at landlords until they spent hours at her endless training program.

  “Look, I told you I went to her,” Carl reminded me. “I explained the problem—Mary Owens’s landlord probably hasn’t inspected his property in years. She still wouldn’t make the call.”

  “But why me? Why don’t you do it?”

  “You’re really good at making things up,” he said.

  Is that a compliment?

  “And you’re really good at thinking on your feet.”

  Do I hear a hairdresser joke somewhere in there?

  He put his arm around my waist and nuzzled my neck. “Please do this for me,” he said, his lips drawing closer to mine. I felt my legs melt.

  “Do what?” Jamie bounded into the kitchen.

  “Nothing, Jamie,” I said, breaking away. “What do you need—a bedtime snack?”

  “Ice cream.”

  “There’s no more ice cream. How about toast with jam?”

  “No.”

  “Carrots and celery like the guinea pig?”

  “No.”

  “Captain Crunch?”

  “Okay.”

  After I fixed him a bowl of cereal, we heard his footsteps racing up the stairs. I pictured the splashes of milk I would need to clean up later.

  Carl handed me my cell phone and a pad with a name and number on it.

  I shook my head.

  “Tracy,” he said. “Nine times out of ten the landlord discovers the meth lab. There’s some kind of repair work or a routine inspection. Then he calls the police. Here we’ve got a property in a rural area where there are no neighbors to smell bad things, no deliverymen to get suspicious, and an absentee landlord who probably hasn’t set foot in our state for fifteen years.”

  He sounded so logical I wanted to call him Judge Judy.

  “We can’t stake out the property unless we put a deer hide in the woods,” he said. “I’ve followed them several times, but they never go to Mrs. Oscar’s gas station. They’re probably stacking their trash in the house and that’s dangerous. Miss Hair Stylist Detective has a cat piss theory and that’s all we have to go on, so what am I supposed to do?”