Courtin' Murder in West Wheeling

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  Even Skip seemed impressed. “Way to go, Homer! You’re smarter’n a jackass.”

  “You try it, Smarty-pants.”

  Skip musta been watchin’ us out the window, ’cause he got the jackass to start, an’ stop, an’ walk in circles—everything but curtsy.

  • • •

  While Skip was walkin’ the jackass around back, I axed Bello would he like breakfast or a drink.

  “White Lightnin’?”

  “When you’re twenty-one. Meantime I got milk, water, soda, an’ lemonade.”

  “Soda.”

  Skip come back then, an’ I sent him inside to get us all a beverage. I wasn’t unhappy when he come back an’ said he was goin’ back in to get breakfast. It gimme a chance to tackle Bello on a matter unrelated to four-footed critters.

  “Bello, you gotta girl?”

  “None of your business, Homer.”

  “I ain’t tryna be personal. Just wonderin’ if you was still fancy free.”

  He looked out at the front yard an’ thought about it fer a while. I sipped my soda.

  Finally Bello said, “I tell you, you promise not to laugh?”

  I kept a perfectly straight face an’ crossed my heart.

  “I’m too scared to get near a girl to ask one….”

  “Know just what you mean. I met Nina Ross when she was sixteen. Took me ’til last spring to get the nerve to ask her out.”

  Bello looked like I’d just told him I was from Mars.

  “No shit?”

  “On my daddy’s grave. You think you’re the first man got speechless around a woman?”

  “I didn’t think….”

  “Well, you ain’t.”

  “But why’d you care? You don’t hardly know me.”

  “’Cause I got favor to ask.”

  He jus’ waited, lookin’ skeptical.

  I said, “You know Owen Rhuddlan’s niece, Cheryl.”

  Bello looked like he’d been gut-punched. He nodded.

  “Owen axed me to find some upstandin’ young feller to take her out. I figgered you fit the bill.”

  Bello swallowed an’ said, “Ain’t a feller in the whole school got the guts to even talk to her.”

  “She that dangerous? Or crazy?”

  “You seen her?”

  “Her pi’ture.”

  “She makes the most beautiful movie actress in Hollywood look like a old hag.”

  “She got a lotta friends?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Well, you seen her hangin’ out with anybody?”

  “No.”

  “It ever occur to you she might be shy? An’ lonely?”

  That set ’im back. He though a minute an’ said, “No-o.”

  “Well, you might find out if you ask her.”

  “Jus’ go up an’ say, ‘Miss Cheryl, are you shy? Or lonely?’”

  “No. Jus’ go up an’ say, ‘Hi, Cheryl. Nice day, ain’t it?’ Then let her talk back. She might tell you somethin’ about herself if she thought you was interested.”

  “Why’d she care if I was interested?”

  “Well, she’s a girl. An’ most girls are interested in horses at some point. An’ you’re the local expert. Ask her if she likes horses.”

  “What if she says no?”

  “Ask her what she does like. Then listen.”

  “An’ if she says, ‘Yes?’”

  “Offer to take her ridin’.”

  “What if she don’t know how to ride?”

  I give him a gimme-a-break look.

  “I should offer to teach her.” I nodded. “But I don’t know how to teach ridin’.”

  I give him another look. “If you can teach a jackass manners, you can teach a halfway intelligent human how to ride.”

  Bello chugged the rest of his soda an’ handed me the can. “I’ll think on it.”

  • • •

  When Rye come in to work next mornin’ he told me, “I think I got a line on your truck hijackers.” He pulled his report outta my inbox an’ dropped it on the desk ’fore he made hisself at home in my guest chair.

  I didn’t even look at it. “What’s the story?”

  “I was gettin’ bored, jus’ sittin’, waitin’ fer speeders to happen by, when I noticed a semi—the trailer had a new coat a paint—slowin’ to avoid a car cuttin’ him off. Tractor was pretty onremarkable—as they say. So I had another look with them nifty binoculars you gimme.”

  Rye paused, prob’ly to let me appreciate his quick thinkin’. I nodded an’ waved my hand in a sideways circle to speed ’im along.

  “Trailer didn’t have no DOT numbers, an’ the plate was a temporary. So I lit up an’ pulled ’im over. Axed to see his papers.

  “He gimme a pretty good fake license an’ a insurance card coulda been real, an’ axed me to give ’im a break ’cause he jus’ picked up the trailer fer a truckin’ concern, an’ if he had any problems he’d be out of a job.

  “I axed him to get out an’ open the trailer for me. That’s when he tried to rabbit an’ I hadda get physical.”

  “You hurt ’im bad?”

  Rye looked offended. “I didn’t hurt ’im. Jus’ turned ’im over to the state boys.”

  I waited fer Rye to tell me what he did do. He was saved from havin’ to confess by the bell—the phone ringin’, anyway. I put up a just-a-minute finger an’ answered it. “Sheriff Deters.”

  “Deters, this is Yates. You want to tell me where you keep your crystal ball?”

  “Might if I knew what you was talkin’ about.”

  “When you were in here asking about hijackings you brought up Cheap-Ass Likkers.”

  “And?”

  “They claim they got hit last night.”

  “You check to see they really did?”

  “No, but that semi your deputy pulled over last night was full of liquor cases with Cheap-Ass shipping labels.”

  “Ain’t that a coincidence.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just day before yesterday, their manager tole me they’d never been held up.”

  “And I take it you don’t believe in coincidence?”

  “Sure I do. An’ UFOs, an’ honest politicians. An’ that Elvis is alive an’ workin’ at 7-11. Them shippin’ labels say where the goods was comin’ from?”

  “No, but you’re telling me to look into Cheap-Ass Likkers. I can take a hint. Thanks for the heads up.”

  He hung up an’ I told Rye what he’d said.

  “Myself,” Rye said, “I was beginin’ to think they’d made a deal with the devil.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Think about it. What else can you make of a chain that can sell goods below Walmart? The only outfit around here never gets hijacked?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Actually, Homer,” he added. “Cheap-Ass Likkers is the devil.”

  pinnin’ down a case

  I couldn’t help myself. Even though the truck hijackin’s was the state cops’ business, I kept thinkin’ about ’em. And wonderin’ how they related to my barbecued trucker an’ the Lower Fork Distillery.

  George Usher, the County Attorney was havin’ lunch at the Grassy-ass when I finally run him down. I waited till he lowered his mornin’ paper ’fore I moseyed over with my coffee mug an’ set down across the table.

  I could tell he weren’t happy to see me even before he said, “What is it you want, Sheriff?”

  “There’s a distillery just this side of the county line that seems to be makin’ likker outta thin air an’ water. Don’t guess I could get a warrant to search the place?”

  “Not without probable cause. What’s it to you if someone’s makin’ moonshine? You aren’t ATF.”

  “Well, might be hard to convince a jury, but a trucker who was usin’ a alias ’cause he lost his license was workin’ for this outfit. He was murdered after bein’ caught in some scheme I ain’t figured out yet, which mighta involved a stolen truck he was drivin’ with phony
papers.”

  “Was the trucker on or about the premises you’re so hot to search when he was killed?”

  “Nope.”

  “Was there evidence that this company was involved in his death?”

  “Nothin’ concrete.”

  County Attorney shook his head. “You got too many might-ases and maybes, Homer. Come back when you got the scheme figured out for sure, and I maybe, might, possibly can get you a warrant.”

  • • •

  Right after I finished my sack lunch, I locked up my office an’ headed over to the state cop shop.

  When I asked at the desk fer Sergeant Underhill, the trooper on duty directed me back to his office. The sergeant was at his desk, sittin’ back in his chair, feet up, studyin’ the big area map on the wall next to his desk. He’d marked all the likker truck hijack locations with red push pins. Perfect. I set down across from him an’ pointed to the map.

  “Think you could mark all the local Cheap-Ass stores with a different color?”

  “I could if I had a reason.”

  “Humor me.”

  Underhill shrugged. He pulled up a list of the store locations on his computer screen an’ marked ‘em on the wall map with green pins. “What’re we seeing here?” he asked when he was done.

  “Seems like more’n a coincidence that this Lower Fork Distillery is central to all them Cheap-Ass Likkers stores. Whose delivery trucks ain’t been hijacked. ’Till I asked if they’d had a hijackin’.”

  Underhill looked thoughtful. “And it’s central to all the other liquor stores whose trucks have been hit.”

  I nodded. “Do tell. But how’d we prove anythin’?”

  “Yeah. This guy your deputy just nailed is well versed in the art of demanding a lawyer. He’s never gonna talk. So any case we could make would be purely circumstantial. And Cheap-Ass Likkers’s general manager swears he’s not missing a shipment.”

  “That’s only ’cause he didn’t check with his bosses ’fore you asked him about it. If he was smart, he’d a claimed he’d been hijacked. That’d divert suspicion and he coulda got his shipment back.” I stared at the red and green push pins on the map tryna get the cuffs on a idea.

  “Too bad we don’t know where the hijackers might hit next,” Underhill said. “We could set up to catch them in the act.”

  “Good idea. You got any other color pins?”

  “For?”

  “I wanna play pin the tail on the varmints.”

  He shook his head like I was hopeless but he dug out a box of different colored pins. “Anything else you need?”

  I waved a circle around the map we’d been decoratin’. “How ’bout a list of all the stores in this area that sell likker?”

  He picked up his phone. “Let me see what the state liquor board has.”

  While Underhill made his call, I got up an’ studied the map. Most of the stores whose trucks got jacked was close enough to the interstate for a quick’n’ dirty get-away. An’ the Cheap-Ass stores was all close to a highway exit or a high-traffic mall or the main drag of a fairly prosperous town.

  Underhill left the room for a minute. When he come back, he dropped a pile of papers on his desk, then set down an’ shoved three pages of addresses my way. “We don’t have the manpower to stake out all these places,” he said, leafin’ through the pages he’d kept fer himself. “Not even those that haven’t been hit yet.”

  I glanced at the pages an’ handed ’em back. “Mebbe we don’t hafta stake out too many.”

  He sat back and took a just-show-me pose.

  I started pullin’ white pins outta the box, shovin’ ’em his way. “Start markin’ the addresses of the stores that ain’t been hit.”

  He only had to think a second on that. When he’d used up all the white pins and a few yellow ones, we studied the distribution.

  He pointed at the white pins. “Most of these are pretty isolated.”

  I swapped a few of the white pins fer yellow ones.

  “Except for those you just changed,” he added.

  “And?”

  “And those have the same approach/escape characteristics as the stores whose deliveries have been hit.”

  “Just what I was thinkin’.”

  “So we’ll only need five or six surveillance teams to cover them.”

  I nodded.

  “Vergil, you are a genius!”

  I didn’t comment on that—seemed like pretty standard police work to me.

  “How long do you think we’ll have to stake out these places?” Underhill said.

  “How long between hits so far?”

  “About two weeks.”

  “How long since the last one?”

  “Ten days—if you don’t count the truck your deputy stopped, which nobody reported hijacked.”

  “There you go.” I stood up an’ put on my hat. “Have fun.”

  a Injun raid an’ misdemeanor court

  Wilma Netherton was standin’ on her porch next mornin’, gettin’ redder by the minute. I stood at the bottom of her porch steps, wishin’ I’d put on my bullet-proof vest ’cause Wilma’s words was comin’ at me like triple-ought buck shot.

  “Sheriff, you got to do something!”

  “I have,” I said. “Like I told you, Miz Lincoln’s got herself a rat dog. Not only ain’t there no rats across the road, there ain’t gonna be.”

  “That’s not what I called about.”

  I waited.

  “That whole place is an eyesore.”

  “Ma’am, if ugly was again’ the law, half a Boone County’d be in jail.”

  I wasn’t sure makin’ Miz Lincoln’s house “disappear” would satisfy Wilma, but I thought long an’ hard on how to do it as I drove back to town.

  • • •

  If that wasn’t enough excitement fer one day, the phone started ringin’ soon’s I got back to my office. When I picked up, Mayor’s secretary said, “Homer, there’s a band of Injuns headed your way. An’ they’re all madder’n Geronimo.”

  ’Bout ten seconds after I hung up, my door flew open, an’ half a dozen men swarmed in—five of the six Injuns from Harlan’s funeral an’ their lawyer. The Injuns was dressed in cotton shirts, Levis, an’ work boots. The lawyer wore sunglasses an’ a three-piece Italian suit so shiny it like to give me eye strain.

  I stood up but stayed behind my desk. “Afternoon, gents. What kin I do fer you?”

  The lawyer done the talkin’. “It’s come to our attention that you’ve got the remains of a Native American in your possession.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”

  “What would you say? Exactly?”

  “I got human skeletal remains that was illegally dumped in a ditch, which is a crime. When I get who did it, I’ll see the remains is properly buried.”

  Stanley Redwine piped in, “That’s not good enough, Sheriff. Those remains are our ancestor. We want them back.”

  “You sayin’ you lost ’em?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You got some way to prove you’re related?”

  The lawyer said, “DNA tests will show—”

  “When they do, I’ll consider your request.” I didn’t think it’d be a good time to bring up the question of who might be gonna pay fer a DNA test.

  “We need the remains to do the test.”

  “Like I said, when I get who dumped ’em, I’ll be happy to talk about it. Meantime, the remains is evidence.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Soon’s they were out the door, I got our local circuit court judge on the phone.

  “Can someone get a writ a habeas corpus fer a corpse?”

  “That would depend on the circumstances.”

  I s’plained about the John Doe case an’ the judge said, “I think you’re on fairly solid ground, Homer, but that won’t stop them from filing a motion to get possession of the bones.”

  “With any luck, I’ll have the case solved ’fore that.”
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  Before I could hang up, the judge said, “By the way, Homer. There was a lawyer in here earlier asking for a subpoena.”

  “And?”

  “He’s suing you for harassment.”

  “Do tell. What’d you advise me to do about it?”

  “I’m a judge. I can’t advise you. You need to get yourself a lawyer.”

  “I’m in the middle of a murder investigation, Judge. Actually, two murder cases an’ a body dumpin’ an’ a burglary. An’ Nina’s got me lookin’ into a mail hijackin’. I ain’t got the time.” I didn’t add, or the money, ’cause I didn’t think it’d be relevant.

  “Well, then, if I were your lawyer, I’d advise you to avoid being served.”

  “An’ if you was my lawyer, I’d say I ’preciate the advice.”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon wonderin’ what I was gonna do fer housing in another week. An’ what to do about Wilma Netherton’s complaints.

  • • •

  Next mornin’ I was on my way to court, to testify against all the law-beaters I’d ticketed last month. Right in front of the court house, before God an’ half the speeders in Boone County, Ed Smithson hocked an’ landed a goober the size of a fried egg on the street.

  I grabbed my ticket book an’ rolled down the window of my cruiser. “Hold up, Ed.”

  He stopped; I got out an’ started writin’.

  Ed said, “What’d I do?”

  I pointed to the slop on the pavement. “I s’pose, technically, that’s litterin’.”

  “You crazy? Man’s got a God-given right to hawk now an’ then.”

  “Mebbe, but spittin’ in public’s unsanitary an’ again’ the law.”

  He made a ‘gimme-a-break’ face an’ said, “Camels spit an’ cobras spit.”

  “So do cads—an’ them last two’re low critters. What’s yer point?”

  “It’s my constitutional right!”

  I handed him the ticket. “You show me where it says so in the Constitution, an’ I’ll tear this up.”

  “I ain’t votin’ for you next time around.”

  I just shook my head an’ parked my cruiser.