He was back to me. “I just couldn’t be sure. With him dead it was just as well if nothing else came up. I mean ... I was connected to it too. But it was perfect the way it was, see. I could blame the twins for the murder, get their land anyway, be a hero for finding my cousin’s killers — same ending as before: happily ever after. I just never figured on ... I never thought she’d be there.” He looked at her like he was on his deathbed looking at the angels. “If I’d known you were there ...”
Dally sat back. “The girl of your dreams.”
He shot a glance back to Lydia. “Look at her. She’s the girl of everybody’s dreams.”
Well, she’d certainly been such stuff as dreams were made on. You had to give her that. Still, I was a little skeptical. “So, Tommy? Why this sudden confession? I mean, why all this talk now? Why tell us everything?”
“She’s been through enough. I never figured on your finding her. I never figured on your being capable of that. You don’t seem like you could find your way to your own shoes, to me, you don’t have the gumption — but I guess you’ve got your ways.” Back to the floor again, like the magic words were written there, the ones that could make Lydia well. “I didn’t think it all through, I guess.” Once again, to yours truly. “I didn’t plan on your being even remotely motivated enough to pursue all this. You seem on the lazy side.”
I wasn’t offended. “Yeah, but I’m lucky.”
Dally wouldn’t hear of it, though. She’s really a swell friend to have, after everything’s said and done. “Luck’s got nothin’ to do with it. He’s got a trick.” She popped me a look that could light up a city block. “His cosmology is the entire human spirit.”
I smiled big. “Boy, you got a memory on you could choke a horse.”
She shook her head. “I remember what I want to.”
The boys didn’t understand, but they nodded like they did.
Dally nudged the moment toward a more immediate concern. “Say, Tom — by the way? What do you think Ronnie’s doing out there under Flap’s car?”
He wouldn’t look us in the eye now. That spot on the floor must have been absolutely fascinating. “Ronnie did us favors.”
I wanted him to tell the story, even though I felt I now knew how it went, so I chimed in. “So I’m told. Did they include drug-running to Atlanta? I’ve got a friend in the business is why I’m asking.”
“Sometimes.”
I nodded. “Go on.”
“So I got him to bug your car. Then I got him to come along with me to help clean up this mess down here, and I needed somebody to watch Lydia while I took care of the boys; you — whatever else came up.” Softer. “I just wanted to make sure she was all right.”
Dally wouldn’t let up. “So?”
“So ... I was pretty sure she’d be out at that house on Cumberland. It’s where she usually went when she ran away from Lowe, or when she was confused. She was there, just sitting on the porch. When I told her Lowe was dead, she just shrugged.”
I was impatient. “Skip on down.”
He shifted; looked at me. “Ronnie was a boy, a little boy. He wasn’t bad, but he had a troubled personality. He was really little more than a stupid petty criminal. I should never have left him with Lydia.”
Lydia spoke up. “It was nothing.”
He was suddenly very hot. “The hell it was.”
Dally intruded once more. “Get on with the story.”
He stabbed a look her way, but went on then. “He was touching her when I came back from finding Mr. Tucker at the same house on Cumberland. He was touching her hair.”
Lydia started to stand. “It was nothing, Tommy. He was just petting my head.” She looked at me. “We were at a little bed-and-breakfast just around the corner from the graveyard.”
I had to ask. “So, Tom — why didn’t you just take her over to her parents’ house?”
He shook his head violently. “Those drunks. They wouldn’t know how to handle sitting down, not even with a set of instructions and a diagram. She didn’t need zookeepers.” He tried to look at her, but he couldn’t — like she was too bright, like he was looking into the sun. “She needed me.”
I nodded. “And when you got there, to the bed-and-breakfast, Ronnie was messing with her.”
“I whipped his ass around so fast his brains nearly came out. I shook him like a big old empty gunnysack, but I could see it was upsetting Lydia, so I took him into the bathroom.”
Lydia was almost to her feet then. “I could hear them arguing.”
He looked at me, not at her. “I popped him a good one on the jaw. He fell back into the sink. Didn’t kill him, but it didn’t do him any good. He was out.”
I knew what was what. “That’s when you got the idea: let Lydia go, let her go where she might lead you to the boys.”
He didn’t even ask how I guessed that. He just nodded. “I came back in, told her she could go.”
Lydia was up now, staring at him. “I’d already told Ronnie I wanted to go back to the sea. I told him my work was done here. He said he couldn’t let me go. But he was sorry. That’s why he was petting my head, because he was sorry.”
Tommy was more frazzled. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I told her to leave; got Ronnie up; called some of my seedier associates here in Savannah; shoved him into my car. I don’t think she had any idea I was right behind her all the way when she was walking over here. I saw her go into the graveyard. I have no idea how long she wandered around in there looking at tombstones while I was taking care of Ronnie.”
She was moving to him. “I was going back to the sea — I was trying to say good-bye to the angel but I heard voices so I stayed in the shadows.”
He looked at me, almost ignoring her, like he was explaining. “I should never have let her out of my sight but for a minute. I mean, that’s how she was talking: that angel crap.”
She was very close now. “I just wanted to say good-bye.” She cocked her head. “Hey — I left my parasol there.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I saw it over there. What were you doing with an umbrella anyway?”
She shook her head. “Parasol. I always have it, to keep out the sun. Last thing I need is to sunburn this lily skin — and I like the little shadow. I’m not sure I want to see everything I see — not that clearly. See what I’m saying?”
Tommy looked like he was trying to move away from her then, trying to ignore her severe strangeness — maybe because it’s one of the things he found so attractive about her. But what do I know?
He looked at me instead. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw your car out there. Jesus. I nearly had a wreck stopping.” He was shaking his head pretty good now. “I really don’t know what I was thinking at that point. I was pretty full up.” Full up with what, he did not report. “I unloaded Ronnie. It was nothing. I hot-wired your car like it was meant to start that way. I laid Ronnie in the road, and ran your heap over him good, three, four times. He was pretty dead after that. Then I called my guys to come and get you. They were right around the corner. I should have known better than to call a set of junkie brothers.”
I smiled. “Only one’s a junkie. The other’s a storyteller.”
Tommy Acree started to ask me all sorts of questions, then stopped in what seemed like mid thought and looked at me like a kid. “What was the matter with me? What was I doing? How’d I let it get to this?”
Lydia was beside him now, like a column of fire, burning that side of his face. She reached out and touched him very softly, it seemed to me. He flinched like it singed him.
She whispered. “It’s all a dream, Tommy. And it’s not even your dream. Isn’t that funny? Don’t worry. There’s nothing to worry about. It’ll all be just fine.”
Big silence.
42 - The Deal
Peachy wanted to move on. “What now?”
I started. “Well, now ...” But I had nowhere to go. “I don’t know.”
And who would have figured, but it was Lydia c
ame up with the first plan. She got to her feet and announced it like she was giving a speech at the Optimist Club.
“Now we go home. The story’s over. We have Tommy arrested by the Savannah police — five witnesses to his confession. Maybe we’ll call that nice boy that plays the viola. He loves me — talked to me all the time at June’s. Then we exhume Lowe’s body for proof. Then we destroy all the drugs he’s got, and that’s that. Then we go back to our families — I maybe go live with the Turners on their farm if it turns out that I’m not entirely a creature from the sea, which it seems possible to me at this point that I might not be, and ... then ...” But she was running out of steam then too.
It had been a long dark night for her. It had taken a lot out of her to set up the whole vision of grand retribution. She’d seen the whole wheel of the cosmos in motion. It’s a rare vision. I’ve had it once or twice myself. It’s absolutely exhausting. But she was in a better frame of mind than she had been for a while, anybody could see that.
I had to be the one to bust her bubble. “Not quite, sugar. See, no matter what, in that scenario you’re the one who actually wielded the murder device. So there’d be a little problem with it: You could still go to jail, or worse.”
She understood immediately. “Especially considering I’m loonier than a peanut farm.”
“There is that.”
“So what?”
The room fell silent. Most seemed to be waiting for me to make with the wise pronouncements. I took a shot.
“Tommy? Lowe was your cousin, and I’m sure you have some good memories of him.”
He shook his head. He didn’t want to play.
I wanted him to. “Come on. One good memory. It’ll make you feel better about all this, I guarantee.”
He was willing to reminisce if it was like a part of the confession. “We used to go bass fishing when we were kids.”
It wasn’t enough for me. “And?”
And then he actually smiled. “It was so much fun. He’d cut up in the boat so big that we fell in the lake half the time; didn’t care a bit. Part of the fun. Didn’t hardly ever catch a thing; didn’t care about that either.”
“Okay, but he turned out to be a very bad man, wouldn’t you agree?”
Tommy took his time, but he nodded after a while. “He got that way.”
“So let’s put Lowe to rest once and for all. What if our plan goes this way: New evidence — that you uncover — indicates that Lowe was — oh, my God — some kind of drug fiend. Maybe you find the drugs in his house or something in his papers or whatever. You request an autopsy. That’ll prove he died of a drug overdose, confirming your worst fears. Then with big ballyhoo you let the boys off the hook. They happily relax into home life again; you’re a big hero for not allowing a travesty of justice. We don’t even need to mention Lydia was ever there, ever involved in any way. And we also don’t bring up your tampering with Lowe’s stash. Everybody’s off the hook. All bets are off. And Lowe Acree gets to rest in peace — at whatever godforsaken level of hell he lives at now.”
He thought.
But I wouldn’t let him think for long. “In exchange for our silence about everything, you get to stay out of jail. But you allow the Turner boys to take Lydia home with them and you promise never, ever to mess with her, apart from the occasional Christmas card, ever again in your life.”
Maytag popped in. “What about Ronnie?”
I looked at Tommy again. “Yeah. What about Ronnie Tibadeau? I mean, I know he was a petty criminal, but ...”
Tommy was recovering a little of his mean-cop persona. “I could always say I killed him in the line of duty.”
Dally had to question that. “By running over him with a car and then handcuffing the body to the chassis? It’s a stretch.”
Tommy made no eye contact.
Lydia had an idea. “You give a large sum of money to his relatives out of the drug money you and Lowe made. They make a donation to the technical school in Tifton in the name of Ronnie Tibadeau, to establish scholarships —”
I had to break in. “— for auto mechanics.”
She nodded. “Right.”
Tommy sighed a sigh like the last breath of a dying man.
Dally filled him in. “Otherwise you die in jail.”
I checked around the room with everybody. “Okay?”
Lydia was philosophical. “I just wish it could all go back to the way it was when I was little, and all this didn’t really matter.”
Dally smiled so sweet, you could have had it for dessert. “Flap’s good, sugar, but he’s already explained to me that the one thing he can’t do” — she shot me a look with the eyebrow lift — “is recall a lost hour. So is this deal good enough?”
Lydia smiled. That smile was the lock on my proposition. Tommy saw it, and nodded his head. We had a deal.
43 - Namesakes
As far as deals go, it worked pretty well. We pulled what was left of poor Ronnie Tibadeau out from under my car. Maytag got the handcuff key from Tommy and unlocked the body. The boys wanted to dispose of him themselves, out of respect for their boyhood acquaintance. They found, appropriately enough, an empty grave in the yard where Ida had lost her voice. They covered him up with a little dirt.
We had a short ceremony where everybody mentioned something good about the boy. I talked about my carburetor. It was very much the product of everybody’s being too tired and too strange and stretched for too many hours. Lydia had a tear or two, and I have to admit to feeling pretty crummy about the kid. After all was said and done, he hadn’t been a bad sort.
Then we all went back to Tifton. The Peaker Brothers handled the exhuming of Lowe’s body. He was in pretty good shape, really, except for the fact that he had no pants on and was wearing boxer shorts with red hearts and Dalmatians. I got a pretty good laugh out of it, and I thought the Peakers might bust a gut slapping their thighs and whacking each other on the arm. Tommy was pretty quiet, but maybe he was remembering going fishing with Lowe as a boy.
Anyway, Lowe was found to have massive amounts of cocaine and heroin in his system. Enough to kill ten guys, they said. The report also mentioned that he’d probably been boating in the last hours before his death because of the presence in his blood of a common remedy for seasickness.
Lydia Sylvia Habersham Acree — that’s the name on her police report — was the dumbfounded inheritor of what was to me a relatively mind-numbing sum of money. It was a sum so staggering to me that I figured grown men would pass out at the mention of it. So remarkable was this sum of money that the guy who was handling the transaction didn’t care to even say it out loud. Seems Lowe Acree was fabulously well-to-do, as they say, and had no last will and testament when he died. So it all went to his grieving widow. She didn’t seem to care much at all one way or the other. She just looked at the sum of money and smiled. Didn’t seem that grandiose to her, I guess. What do I know? I get excited about a fifty-dollar bill.
Lydia paid off Dally’s new club on River Street without asking, without even blinking an eye. She wanted to buy me a new car, but I told her the one I had ran just fine. She acquired Lowe’s home of course. She had it demolished. There was some talk among us of salting the earth, too, but it never panned out. Lydia built a garden park on the land instead, much to the chagrin of the ritzy neighbors. Planted a lot of impatiens.
Lydia herself moved in with the Turner family. She had her own little room, and she loved to cook with Ida. And every chance she got she’d head east, to the ocean.
Except for a card every December the twenty-fifth, she was never to hear from Tommy Acree again.
And by fall quarter there was a new perpetual scholarship fund at the technical school in Tifton.
For the Turner boys nothing much changed. They were very happy to have Lydia with them whenever she could be there, and the house was filled with laughter nearly all the time. They invited me to their Thanksgiving dinner, but I couldn’t make it. Maybe next time.
&nbs
p; I did eventually get a bottle or two of Rusty’s Barbecue. And despite my unshakable opinion that the word wine only applies if it’s red and comes from France, Rusty’s makes an okay after-dinner drink — like a port, only completely unsophisticated.
When I went down to pick up a case and tie up the last loose ends in Tifton that January, I happened to run into good old Pevus Arnold.
“Hey! Mr. Tucker! Hey!” He was glad to see me.
“Pevus.”
“Look.” He pushed a cute young girl my way. “It’s my wife. You done saved her life. We went up to that Dr. Thompson like you said.”
She was reverent. “He’s a saint.”
Pevus shrugged it off. “She likes him. Anyway, guess what? You’ll never guess.”
“Okay, so tell me.”
“We didn’t never know it, but she’d got twins.”
She nodded, very proud. “We had twins.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Wow.”
He was earnest. “Uh-huh, and if we hadn’t found it out when we did, things might just of gone real bad for ’er. That’s what they said at the doctor’s. But thanks to you, we all gonna be just fine.”
She was impatient. “Tell him.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, seein’ as how you got us to the doctor — and also because you saved Peachy and Maytag, which I did tell you they were my buds and it makes you a kinda local hero down here or whatnot — we think the world and all of you. So, if you don’t mind —”
She couldn’t wait. “We named the babies after you and Ms. Oglethorpe.”
Without the least self-consciousness he added the kicker. “You a old dude, an’ prob’ly ain’t never gonna have none of your own, so we thought it was kind of an honor or what have you.”
So, okay, then I really didn’t know what to say. “You actually want to name your children Flap and Dalliance?”
She spoke like she was in church. “Oh, yes.”
He explained it to me. “One’s a boy and one’s a girl, see?”
She thought about it. “They don’t look much alike, for twins.”
Too Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 2) Page 19
