Pulling out of his kiss, I washed my hands and cut the cantaloupe, cleaned out the seeds, peeled it, and put in on a platter, while Philip hovered, making the inane suggestion that he help.
“Please, go watch things in the living room,” I said.
“The other gentlemen seem to be doing fine. They are discussing something tedious about sooty mold and aphids in the garden.”
“Just go check on them,” I snapped.
“You really are high-strung.”
“Listen, short man with thick glasses, I don’t need your criticism right now. I’ve got a sheriff’s office investigator and a fifty-year-old man with pigtails and criminal proclivities drinking wine in the living room and an infant pulling on the ears of a tipsy one-hundred-pound dog. Now why wouldn’t I be high-strung?” With that, Philip apologized as I shoved him out of the kitchen with repeated instructions to keep the peace in the living room. In the solitude of my own kitchen, I finished washing things to my satisfaction and began to set the table.
Though the potpie gave out too soon, and I saw Tired poking at the tofu chunks with a puzzled look, we managed to each get enough food to quiet our nerves. We finished off everything except the fake ice cream and we drank way too much wine and Redfish showed great gusto with the tofu cheesecake, but none whatsoever toward the salad. It reoccurred to me that I didn’t have a clue as to what age you could feed what to a baby, but neither did anybody else, and we all just ate and drank and acted for all the world like this was a normal party and not a gathering of lunatics.
With some trepidation, I left them all in the living room while I cleaned up the kitchen. Each man offered to help me, and to each I refused because no one cleans up a kitchen to my standards except me. Dave did tiptoe into the kitchen to kiss my neck and tell me it was a “real good supper,” and by the way, “that boyfriend of yours don’t know spit about baseball. And you and me, we sure got to talk, and I got to get that money back.”
I put Philip’s lack of expertise about sports into his plus category, ignored the comment about the money, and shooed Dave out.
Then we all sat around drinking wine and playing the wait-’em-out game to see who would end up alone with me. I was betting on Dave, but rooting for Philip, primarily on the theory that kissing would be a better nightcap than interrogating Dave about just what he was up to.
But Tired was hanging in there too, no doubt thinking that catching me in an exhausted and somewhat tipsy state might make me bubble forth with incriminating answers about the sordid events of the last week.
Bearess lifted her head and barked at the door. Nothing to do but answer it, I thought, and opened the door to my neighbor, who was wearing her Covenant Nazi expression as she poked her head in my house and looked around. Redfish was sleeping, curled in his daddy’s lap, and I doubted Nazi Neighbor could see him. But her face registered a certain level of dismay at seeing Tired and Dave.
“You having some kind of AA meeting, or what?” she asked, sounding vexed.
Oh, like it was any of her business.
“A church gathering,” I said. “A committee discussing the organization of a . . . research committee on the burning issue of whether the Antichrist is alive today.”
“Well, of course he is. Everybody knows that. But I came to tell you that all of your . . . guests . . . they are all parked in the street, instead of in your driveway. One of the cars is blocking my driveway.”
“You were planning on going out?” At what, midnight?
“That’s not the point. I want that pickup moved from blocking my driveway.”
Covenant Nazi took a final look at my crowd and stomped back next door.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “time to go before she calls the police.”
One by one, they said their thank-yous and their good nights and left. I hugged Philip and Dave both, and whispered to each to be sure to call me in the morning, but not before six. With excessive formality, I shook Tired’s hand and thanked him again for the okra.
Once they were all gone, I breathed a great sigh of relief. Tired’s odd confession in my doorway about the recovered gun was the only mention of the misadventures of the last few days. None of us had talked about Kenneth or Earl or that guy in the swamp. No doubt because not one of us wanted to tip his or her hand in front of the others.
After putting Bearess out in the backyard, where she promptly began barking at a wine-induced hallucination, I went inside and began frantically cleaning up. I cleaned until on the verge of my dropping, Bearess demanded reentrance and we went to bed.
Tomorrow, I thought, as I listen to muffled dog snores from under my bed, I would track Benny to the ends of the world if necessary to force from him whatever secrets he was keeping from me.
Chapter 25
It is entirely possible, even probable, that there is no such thing as a normal life. Nonetheless, when I awoke at 5 A.M. with a profound need to clean the already clean house and throw out stuff, I made myself roll over again and hoped to fall back to sleep because that is what I believed a normal person would do on a Sunday morning.
At six, I said the hell with it and got up. I cleaned the kitchen, the living room, and the bathroom until my next guest could eat off the floor, the wall, or the ceiling. All traces of last night’s company obliterated, I made coffee and fetched in the paper and woke a grumpy Bearess and put her out.
Sunday.
Normal.
Bonita.
A logical connection. Eyeing the phone and assuring myself that it was late enough to call, I did just that, announcing in my take-no-back-talk tone that I needed to talk to her and Benny right then.
“We’re on our way to Mass.”
“Fine. Come by and pick me up. I’ll go and we’ll talk.”
“You’ll come in? At Mass?”
“Of course.” It was Sunday and I wanted to be normal.
In barely enough time for me to slip into a conservative dress and fluff my hair, Henry, dressed just as spiffily as a GQ cover, rang my bell and escorted me to his van, where I crowded in with Felipe Junior and a sulky Armando. We were so crowded, Carmen had to sit in my lap.
At Mass, I never knew when to sit or stand or speak, having been raised a heathen. The only church I had much experience with was Delvon’s Pentecostal church, and there one could jump, roll, shout, sing, speak in diverse languages, and plain old holler without any preordained organizational patterns and nobody thought a thing about it. But Mass was organized and I rather liked it. Delvon’s church made me anxious, especially since it was Delvon who was most likely to jump up and holler in a foreign language.
After Mass, we shook hands with the priest, gathered back into the van, and Henry dropped us all at Bonita’s. Naturally Bonita invited me to stay for lunch. Given that she and I had not had one moment of privacy to discuss things, and I was hungry, I agreed. There was a large, loud family discussion about what we should have for lunch. Bonita apparently runs a democratic household and the five kids outvoted us. Henry was to go and get pizza for all of us. Bonita fretted over what he might fetch for me, but I assured her that a whole-wheat crust veggie for me and Carmen, who oddly enough for a six-year-old is a total green-pepper freak, would do, fat and all. As it is a well-known scientific fact that hot tomato sauce will kill germs, pizza is a food I can eat without washing it twice. Damn that Philip anyway, thinking I was afraid of food.
Inside Bonita’s house, her answering machine beeped with a collection of two messages from Tired, identifying himself as a sheriff’s office investigator who needed to speak with her immediately. He left four telephone numbers—home, office, cell, and pager—all of which Bonita ignored as she erased the tape.
Time was of the essence, Tired was on the case, so I dragged Bonita into her bedroom, eyed it covertly for signs that Henry might have spent some time in it, and, finding none, launched into a manic, short-winded version of my conversations with Tired.
“So you told him,” Bonita said, studying
me strangely, I thought, “that you loaned me your car so that I might go home, as one of my children was ill. That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing about Kenneth.”
“Absolutely not. Nothing about Kenneth bothering you that day.”
I waited for Bonita to sigh and chastise me for the tiny bit of wordsmithing involved in this.
She nodded. “You didn’t say which child?”
“No. I told Tired you had so many I couldn’t remember.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll tell Tired the same thing. He’s left seven messages on my machine since Friday night. Carmen has allergies. I’ll tell him she was the one sick.”
Whoa. Bonita was going to lie?
The telephone rang. As Bonita moved to the kitchen to answer it, I practically dashed to Benny’s bedroom, knocked on the door, and tried to open it. It was locked. Okay, he was a fifteen-year-old boy. Of course it was locked.
“Go away,” he said from behind the door.
“Benny, it’s me, Lilly.” Damn, what was that word for godmother? “Your madrina. Open up.”
Clank. Clomp, clomp, and there he was, looking as morose as he had at Mass, but no longer dressed as nicely.
“You have to tell me what’s going on. Everything. Now,” I said, vaguely ashamed of the begging tone in my voice.
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Benny, this is me. Lilly. Come on.”
“Nothing’s going on.” Benny shouted this. “I’m not a . . . chismoso.” He slammed the door and I heard the sound of a click. I banged on his door and then heard him turn the music up to an unhealthy level.
Bonita came trotting down the hallway. “Don’t . . . don’t take offense. He’s—”
“Upset?” Yes, I could see that for myself. “Bonita, what’s a chismoso?”
“A tattletale.”
Uh-oh.
Benny was protecting somebody, and the two people who popped into my mind were Bonita and Dave. Until I knew what Benny knew, it was imperative that Tired not get to him.
“Listen, Bonita, whatever you do, do not, don’t, do not, not, not let Benny or Henry talk to Tired. Neither one of them can lie worth shucks, and it’s pretty clear that they’re hiding something, and Tired is suspicious already.”
I waited for a denial or a sigh. Instead, Bonita nodded. “We are Benny’s comadres,” she said. “We must protect him.”
Comadres? Literally, co-mothers, or a godmother and a mother. Bonita had never honored me with this term before and I was touched. And moved to redouble my efforts to find out the truth and protect Benny. I hoped the two were not mutually exclusive goals.
The phone rang. Nobody answered it. After the sixth ring and the beep, Tired’s voice came on again.
Bonita and I listened to the message, and we both sighed.
“As soon as Henry gets back, I’ll send him and Benny over to Gracie’s.”
This seemed reasonable and I nodded.
“What are they hiding?” I asked, hopeful somebody would tell me before I popped.
Bonita looked at me a long time before she shook her head.
When Henry came back with the pizza, I phoned Philip and asked him to come over and represent Bonita because I would bet that Tired was going to appear at the door before the boys ate the last pepperoni. We had to have that stupid conflict-of-interest argument again, but I wore Philip down and he agreed to come over.
I wondered if he charged time and a half on a weekend, like plumbers do.
As it was, Tired beat Philip by about a half hour, but Henry and Benny had made their escape before Tired got there, and before Philip arrived, Carmen charmed Tired with her detailed narrative of her version of “Snow White,” which involved a Mexican princess and a toad who kissed her and something about a horse with wings.
And because Philip was very, very good at his job, all Tired learned was that Bonita and her children had spent Saturday at Busch Gardens, gone to Mass this morning with me, then gone for pizza, and that Bonita and I had traded cars on Friday afternoon so she could pick up Carmen at Gracie’s because Carmen has allergies. If this was news to Carmen, she didn’t let on, and I was sure Henry would coach Gracie on the same story.
And, to Tired’s credit, he was unfailingly polite, and if he knew he was being wordsmithed to, he didn’t show it.
After Tired left, I went in search of Dave to have the conversation with him I hadn’t had with him the night before. But for all I learned from him, as he sat on the hippie couch in the yurt with no sign of Cat Sue anywhere, I could have saved that long, slow drive through traffic on State Road 72. He insisted that he had to have “his” money back, and that he didn’t know anything, hadn’t personally known Mike Daniels, aka dead swamp man, didn’t know Kenneth, didn’t know what or if Benny was hiding anything, and his only sin was loving a married woman and stealing her husband’s wine.
“So, okay, explain that wine thing, then. Why’d you steal it?”
“Ah, Lilly Belle, I just got hurt and pissed off.”
Huh? I thought money was the motive. “What do you mean?”
“See, Cat Sue and me had kind of taken up with each other. Keeping company, and all. I got in deeper than I meant to, so I asked her to come away with me. You know, leave Earl. Go up to Georgia with me. Or maybe Oregon. But she turned me down, broke up with me. Gave this long, old speech about what a great man Earl was.”
“So you stole Earl’s wine because his wife wouldn’t leave him?”
“Man, yeah. I asked myself what Willie might do, and you know, I thought of the Red-Headed Stranger album, and just figured Willie would steal the wine and ride off into the hills.”
Well, okay, there was Dave logic in that somewhere.
“Then why’d Cat Sue drop the charges after Earl was dead? Wasn’t she mad at you?”
“Look, Cat Sue’s . . . she’s not like you. She’s not good at being alone. And it’s not like you think, me here with her now. We’re not . . . you know, we’re not . . . she’s still too broke up over Earl.”
Dave was telling me that he was living with a woman and doing her bidding, but without sex? My Lord, he was in love.
“Man, see, without Earl, she needed me,” Dave said. “So when Philip explained to her that as the . . . what did he call it? Successor in interest or something to Earl’s wine, you know that man talks like a lawyer, don’t you? Anyway, once Philip explained to her that she stood in Earl’s shoes and could drop the charges, she did just that. Cat Sue wanted me back to help her, and she needed me.”
Something still didn’t ring a 100 percent true here, though a 100 percent with Dave was a lot to ask. “But that night Waylon came to get the wine, Cat Sue brought him to my house.”
“Yeah, see Earl got home unexpectedly, he was supposed to be in San Francisco on some wine-convention deal, but I guess he got bored or something. Anyway, I thought I had a few days, but Cat told me later that when Earl came back, he went to check on things and found the wine stolen. She figured me for it right away, and, man, she still had a soft spot for me. So, after Earl went for the sheriff, Cat Sue got Waylon and they were trying to get the wine back so they could, you know, sweet-talk Earl out of calling the police. But, like you know, that didn’t work.”
Dave paused, and I thought he looked wistful, perhaps like a man still struggling with unrequited love.
“So after you and Benny found that dead man in the swamp with the money, you had Benny take the cash to Cat Sue to use to get you out of jail, right?” Damn, talk about your leading question. Where was opposing counsel to object? Realizing I had just fed Dave the official Benny explanation, I waited for Dave’s reaction.
When he only nodded, I pressed forward.
“Why didn’t you just tell Benny to take the money to me?”
“See, ’cause I wanted Benny to . . .” Then he stopped. Dave looked at me and frowned. “Yeah. You know . . .” This time Dave paused fo
r so long I could practically hear the wheels of deception peeling rubber in his brain. “See, I . . . Well, I reckon that would’ve made more sense. I mean, normally I like to ask myself what Willie would do, but, man, I didn’t have time. See, things were happening so fast, I guess I just didn’t think clear.”
Well, that’d be a first, I thought.
As I tried to assimilate Dave’s story into some Big Picture that made sense and assess just how much Dave was lying to me, he said, “You know, I sure could use that sack of money back. I’ve got me some expenses.”
While I wasn’t entirely clear that Dave’s claim to the sack of cash was any greater than mine—oh, yeah, okay, he had found it in a wild-hog-and-snake-infested swamp, but I’d been hit over the head and sent to the ER in the act of losing it and had broken and entered to steal it back—I did offer a compromise. “I’ll get that sack of cash back to you, but you tell me the absolute truth about the night you got arrested.”
“Belle, sweetheart, I just did.”
We glared at each other a bit, me accusingly so and Dave with the face of an innocent. After a few more rounds, I officially gave up and left Dave with the offer that once he told me everything, I would bring him back the sack of cash.
Still frustrated, I went to my office with the firm intention of working, but I sat and ruminated. What I finally settled into worrying about the most was Bonita. And Kenneth. And his threatened lawsuit against her. The more I worried and pondered it, the more I wanted a good look inside Kenneth’s house.
Figuring Henry for another breaking-and-entering project, I phoned him at Gracie’s, where he was hiding from Tired. Gracie didn’t want to admit that Henry was there. But when I insisted that I already knew Henry was at her house, she put him on the line. Henry took some serious convincing, but I told him we needed to be sure there was nothing at Ken’s that would hurt Bonita. That pretty much did the trick in the end. Reluctant Henry and I made a date for 2 A.M. at my house as the staging zone and I told him not to wear a suit and tie this time. Then I went home and made coffee and paced until Henry drove up, right on the dot of two.
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